Reviving Robin Hood: The Complicated Process of Crème Brûlée
by SuperiorDimwit
Summary: It has been three days since the world didn't end, and for the first time Aziraphale can be who he is and do what he wants without fear of repercussions. What better way to celebrate this newfound freedom than by masterminding an art heist? (It's all perfectly sensible, if you'd just hear him out.)
1. Tuesday morning, Soho

So! Here we are! The Good Omens Big Bang is drawing towards its end, and I'm here to contribute a 9 chapters long love-letter to the book (and TV series) and its amusing writing style.

If you find me on AO3, you can see the artwork too! Courtesy of Clenster and Desmyblack, and kind help from beta reader TheOldAquarian, Fox Populi, and Olivia!

(After this I go back to Blue Exorcist, this was an insane amount of work for comparatively little text, phew.)

All the best, everyone!  
/Dimwit

* * *

**Tuesday morning, a bookshop in Soho**

Aziraphale knows exactly what he is doing.

Strictly speaking, all angels know what they're doing. It's very simple, when all you have to do is follow God's Will. Unfortunately, this entire worldview had been tipped on its head the day the Apocalypse didn't happen, and 10 million angels had discovered that none of them had the foggiest idea what they were doing.

That is to say, nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine angels made that discovery. Angels are very particular about numbers.

What Aziraphale discovered that day was that he had been carrying out his own will, and not God's, since, well, the Beginning, really. More precisely, he'd been winding Crowley around his little finger since the Beginning. And he had been aware of it. That was the problem. Knowing what you're doing is good, except for when you know that what you are doing is wrong and you still do it. That sort of thing is called temptation, if you take out all the unnecessary words Aziraphale had put in there to avoid facing the reality of the matter.

He had blamed it on Crowley for the first few centuries. Demons tempted, that was their nature, and Crowley had always been very talented, and clever, and wily, and... tempting. To leave such a skilled adversary unmonitored was out of the question. It would have been irresponsible for any angel, and even more so for one who was assigned to Earth for the express purpose of thwarting the evils of demons lurking about the human world.

The keen observer will point out that Aziraphale's verbose self-deception is called lying. He had become surprisingly good at that, for an angel. Just not good enough to fool himself.

It has been three days since the world didn't end, and Aziraphale knows exactly what he's doing: he's building a nest for himself and Crowley, and has been doing so for the past 200 years.

It should be pointed out that knowing what you're doing does not mean you know _ how _to do it. At all.

Because Aziraphale has been working on his bookshop for centuries and it's still not _ right_. There's comfortable furniture to lounge in, good wine they both like, and music Aziraphale enjoys and Crowley enjoys complaining about, yet something is missing. There's a _ demon _missing, for one thing, but why? Crowley likes the bookshop, that much is evident from how often he drops by on some excuse or another. He just isn't registering it as a nest. Not one intended for him. What Aziraphale needs is something that tells him in no uncertain terms that he would like Crowley to drop by and never leave. And that something is missing.

The bookshop likes to think itself most helpful. It has attuned itself to Aziraphale over many years, and whenever he brings new additions the shop shuffles the books around to free up space. It regulates the temperature for the benefit of the more brittle works, and circulates the air just enough that it's saturated with dust and other things that irritate the eyes and throats of humans. It breeds the biggest, hairiest variety of spiders in a secluded corner under the radiator, and they are always on the books Aziraphale doesn't want visitors to touch, much to the confusion of the spiders.

The bookshop is _ mostly _helpful, if you ask Aziraphale. Sometimes it puts all his antique Kama Sutra editions on the front shelf when Crowley visits, and no amount of stern – or flustered – glares will make it budge until he physically gathers up the volumes and puts them away.

In the spirit of helpfulness, a confounded house plant finds itself atop the couch table. It is a nice place for a plant, and the flower looks like something in the first edition volume of Curtis' _ Flora Londinensis _ that Crowley had happened upon at an online auction.

"Thank you, dear." Aziraphale smiles, and his chest fills with the blossoming sensation of a place well loved. "I'm afraid that isn't it, though."

The plant returns to the firmament with a wave of his hand. No, plants are what Crowley will bring with him when he moves in. That's the trick to making an appealing nest: you have to leave blanks. Furnish it with the comfort of you, but build it like praying hands cupped around the empty space in your heart.

A stack of books materialises on the table in place of the plant. They are spy novels, the covers say: historical spy novels, even, though Mrs Bourne clearly has her own ideas about what clothes looked like in the 1810's, and how they were worn.

"Definitely not it."

The books disappear and a complete collection of E.L. James novels manifests in their stead.

Aziraphale gives it a long, silent stare that ought to make the books shrivel to dust. "When I come back, that had better be gone." Upon which he turns on his heel and leaves the shop.

Needless to say, looking for something without knowing what you're looking for is almost as frustrating as knowing what you're doing but not how to do it.

* * *

**A/N**

The referenced works are the _Spymasters_ series and the _Fifty Shades_ series. Both of which are romantic, in a sense, if you lock your ethical concerns in the attic and down a few glasses of wine.


	2. Tuesday morning, Docklands

**Tuesday morning, an office building in the Docklands**

Vincent is in his early thirties, has his kids every other week, and enjoys eating out alone to watch the other people at the restaurant. His eldest child is showing a worrisome interest in BMX sports, but that aside Vincent is quite pleased with life in general. He's not an angel, but he is particular about numbers. And he knows exactly what he's doing.

He's currently wondering if the people in head office know what_ they _are doing. They have issued a tax inspection of Mr Fell's bookshop in Soho, on the grounds of Mr Fell doing his taxes correctly. This is something of a regular occurrence. His colleague, Paul, calls it their very own Eurovision Song Contest: always a spectacle, and most often an embarrassment.

They had repeated this no fewer than five times, an effort that some would call insanity while others would look at it, nod sagely, and proclaim it state-of-the-art scientific research. Most things are a matter of perspective, anyway, so either the people in head office were nuts, or they were investigating some ineffable aspect of accounting statistics.

The first inspection had turned up nothing. Fell's accounts were _flawless, _in that way taxes never were because to err is to be human. There was absolutely no need to investigate someone who knew how to keep their accounts, but Fell's impeccably organised papers seemed to have offended head office into thinking he must be getting away with murder, or at the very least cigarette smuggling. The second inspection, only a year later, had also turned up nothing. At least not in terms of accounting errors.

There had been a lone visitor at the second inspection, a man smeared against the bookshelves like a menacing dark stain on the wall of a crime scene. He wore form-fitting black from head to toe, did not seem the least interested in books, and had quietly glared holes in the backs of the inspectors from behind his sunglasses, like some lanky incarnation of Poe's raven. "A business acquaintance," Mr Fell had explained when asked about it, and smiled.

The office was in solemn agreement that said business had nothing to do with the selling and purchasing of books.

Vincent had been there for the three inspections since; Paul had been part of the last two, and both had experienced firsthand the unseen, burning stare of the business acquaintance in black. Neither of those inspections had found anything incriminating, unless you counted the car parked outside the bookshop. Vincent could have sworn that was a no-parking zone, yet the yellow lines ran all the way down the street except for that one spot outside Mr Fell's.

The car looked like it would commit crime on its own if you took your eyes off it. It was a vintage Bentley straight out of the garage of a film noir mafioso: spotlessly black, with the kind of curved design that, as Paul put it, "should be R-rated and pixelated".

It was Paul who had snapped a picture of the Bentley, run the number plate against RegArchive, and determined that the man with the sunglasses must be Anthony J Crowley. Mr Crowley, he reported, after applying his facebook-stalker search methods with fervor bordering on the religious, did not have a criminal record _officially_, but didn't seem to have any debt, job, education, friends, or registered family either. As far as the internet was concerned, he might as well have materialised out of thin air.

Paul and the rest of the office firmly believe that Anthony J Crowley is either a secret agent, an assassin, a gangster, or possibly all three.

Paul is the only one who doesn't seem to think this is a problem.

"Do you think he'll be there again?"

"Who?"

"Mr Anthony J." Paul pronounces it as if it were the name of a new club in Soho, one that has a certain reputation about its VIP rooms already at the opening day, and a tongue-in-cheek guarantee about good customer service that make people blush and break eye contact.

"Paul, as your colleague and friend, and self-appointed preserver of your stupid arse – though I don't know why I took that job or when I even applied: _leave it_. You have crap taste in guys, you _know _you have – don't gimme that look, you know it's true. You could've worked with the police force, 'cause _you_, _never_, fail to find the bad apple in the bunch." And from what he has seen of Anthony Crowley, that apple is carrying a visible past expiration date tag in every angle of his extravagant slouch.

"Ah but you're missing the most important part: this one's a _ginger_. That's called fate, Vin. Double the ginger, twice the spice."

"I am five seconds away from breaking into your flat and burning all books I find on pick up lines."

People have opinions. This has caused a great deal of trouble throughout history, which has resulted in people having more opinions than ever. Paul's opinion on cringe-worthy pick up lines was that they were very useful. They were a way to test people's aptitude for wit, their aim with a cocktail glass, and if Paul's attractiveness was enough to overcome his personality. Vincent just considered them cringe-worthy. These particular debates usually ended with Paul threatening to take back custody of the coleus plant that lived on Vincent's desk.

"If we try being realistic for a moment. Can we do that?" Vincent is using what Paul calls his 'dad voice', because age is the only number tax inspectors don't care about. "How do you even know he's gay? You're gonna walk up to some bloke who can probably kill with a pair of nail clippers and go 'did it hurt when you fell from heaven?' just seeing how that turns out?"

"Have you seen his trousers?" It's a rhetorical question, though it is actually a rather good one. They have both seen Mr Crowley _walk_, and the way he walks has a tendency to make people forget he's wearing trousers at all. "Have you seen _him? _He's bi. I know it – I _sense _it." He flutters his fingers about like a children's show magician. The rumoured gaydar is another thing they have different opinions about, although the argument boils down to Paul saying Vincent doesn't have one and Vincent agreeing that he can't have something that doesn't exist. "I'll have a witness there with me, so what's he gonna do? Worst case scenario is he tells me to sod off and that's the end of that."

Very few people know what Vincent actually does at work. They assume it has to do with numbers and records, which is true. But whenever he's about to go into detail they get that look in their eyes, like people who are being asked out on a date they're not interested in but haven't got the decency to decline, and suddenly they remember they left the stovetop on back home and have to rush off quite hurriedly.

What Vincent does at work, aside from going through numbers and records, is to act as the voice of common sense on Paul's shoulder. He knows exactly why he took that job, no matter what he might claim: work, the experts say, should be "stimulating" and "challenging". Paul is both.

"Okay, suppose he's bi: is he available? Have you thought about that? Maybe he's shagging Mr Fell."

"Oh be real, Fell's not his type!"

It's hard to find any good argument around that. Mr Fell certainly gave off the impression that he was gay, but he also seemed to give off an impression that had the same effect on people as Vincent talking about his job.

"You know that game when you describe yourself with a film or book title?" Vincent nudges the coleus into the relative safety behind his paper storage. "Have you considered _Pride and Prejudice? _"

Paul peers around his computer screen with a look that, like a shot of tequila, is one part acid, two parts dry alcohol, and a bucketful of salt.

"Vin, he runs an antique bookshop."

Vincent's response is more along the lines of a strawberry daiquiri: sweet, and full of self-inflicted misery.

"You're a tax inspector, Paul."

* * *

Humans are often wrong about Crowley, because Crowley has made an art of giving the wrong impression. He has never been part of organised crime. He has never been employed as an agent by any intelligence unit, either, and he has never committed murder – unless you count Ligur, but then you might also need to count other things that are sentient but not strictly speaking _alive _the way beings on Earth understand it. Like CEO's. Or YouTube influencers.

Crowley does, however, have a long history of conning tax workers.


	3. Thursday, 14th century Gotham

**Thursday, 14th century, in the village of Gotham**

Aziraphale always tried to see things from the bright side. He felt it was in keeping with the Ineffable Plan, and how everything that happened forwarded it in one manner or other: therefore, there was always some positive aspect to the situation, if you just looked hard enough.

The 14th century came very close to proving him wrong.

Whenever he and Crowley discussed historical events, Aziraphale made no attempt to argue any point on Crowley's long list of why it was the worst century in the entirety of human history. Aziraphale had lived through it, he had squinted to catch the bright side to anything, and he had come out of it with nothing but a newfound need for reading glasses.

It had seemed so innocuous. The climate had been pleasantly warm for a period, long enough to see a spike in harvest and in population, which in turn meant economic growth and an overall pleasant life for quite a lot of people. Business theory loved a big population, and Famine cracked his knuckles and went to business. First of the four, he swept cold summers and crop failure over the land. In his tracks followed Pestilence, with a fresh set of epidemics and millions of malnourished immune systems to try them out on. The sheep died, the cows died, and while God did not play games with the universe, the Horsemen certainly did.

Not all died horrid deaths in the 14th century, mind. Every game has its underdog, and the village Aziraphale was currently riding for had drawn the Joker in the deck: madness.

That is to say, the humans thought it was madness, and human thinking was not always a reliable citation. They had explained madness variously as a miasmic contagion; as insects that were crawling around in the brain; as being possessed by the spirit of the moon; or as an imbalance of fluids, although that one had some merit depending on which type of fluid they were talking about and what quantities they imbibed.

Madness, as angels and demons understood it, was a misalignment between the mind and the present. A kink in the communication line between the senses and the brain. Sometimes it let humans make connections between things their senses couldn't even perceive and allowed them to read, as if peering through the eyes of the Almighty Herself, the invisible laws that governed the universe. Sometimes they just ended up drooling a lot and needed to be kept away from sharp objects. And sometimes, their minds drifted so far and fully from the present that they were able to see things that did not belong in their own lifetime. Madness as such was not contagious, but certainly heritable.

There was no explanation that Aziraphale knew of for how an entire village could be struck by lunacy all at once. He had his theories, but he would have to see it for himself. The humans living in the countryside seemed to think that qualified him as mad, too. They treated Gotham the same as they would treat a village struck by plague, and pleaded with Aziraphale to turn back every time he stopped to ask directions.

Gotham was a collection of squat stone houses with thatched roofing, situated in the midst of brown, soggy fields. It was a charming little place, aside from the people running around with underwear on their heads. One of them seemed to be giving his wheelbarrow the baptismal rites in a roadside puddle.

"Excuse me, madam?" he addressed a woman whose hair hung wild and dirty about her shoulders. "Could you perhaps enlighten me as to what has happened here?"

"Of course, good sir!" She plodded up next to his horse and put down her basket of small, gnarled pine cones. With the casual and practiced ease of one who handles calves for a living, she took firm hold of his ankle and lifted.

"Madam?"

The woman studied the sole of his boot with grave professionalism. "An unexpected encounter will bring joy, but also grief. Lady Fortune tips her horn of plenty into thy purse, it will serve you well to not spend all of it at once." She traced a finger over the patterns of mud and grass under his boot and hummed to herself. "Probably should avoid too much running. Got to be mindful of that old heart, sir."

"I see." He did not. "Thank you."

She curtsied and, after carefully nudging a pine cone into his saddlebag, continued on her way.

Aziraphale sighed an 'oh dear' under his breath. He watched the pine cone woman climb in through the window of what was hopefully her own house. He glanced over at the fellow who was baptising his wheelbarrow – it was a William – and decided he would have to try a different approach.

Aziraphale closed his eyes and opened another pair. Strictly speaking, eighteen other pairs.

It's not actually the eyes that see: that was something people used to assume before science invented neurology. Seeing, in scientific terms, is what happens when light hits an object and the object hits back, scattering the light in all directions. What the eye does is focus that light to a single point back at the optic nerve, and this is what allows the brain to interpret the colours and outlines of objects. In less scientific terms, seeing is when the brain gets stabbed by broken rainbows.

This is nothing like what Aziraphale did. Science would have a very hard time describing what he and his 38 eyes did, if there had been any instrument that could register surges in angelic presence. If there had been, it would have obtained the first recorded instance of an ethereal being blurting out 'bugger'.

Aziraphale flexed and stretched his fingers, like one does when making sure a glove sits nice and snug. He had returned all his senses to his corporation, and his human eyes were overcast with concern. Nothing was amiss with the villagers. Their minds were unfrayed, the thoughts he'd skimmed were all aligned, and there was no thrum of divine or demonic interference anywhere in the area.

He urged his horse onwards, past the wheelbarrow man and into the heart of the village. Most of the humans there seemed not to be speaking at all, only laughing or screaming wildly, with one particular girl barking and walking on all fours. After some deliberation, Aziraphale steered his horse towards one who seemed comparatively docile.

"Sir, may I have a word?"

The heavyset fellow sat on the ground before a series of small holes. He looked up at the gentleman on the horse, then promptly held out a brown rock for him to inspect. "Hen or cock'rel, you reckon?" Eggs can look an awful lot like rocks, an evolutionary advantage that acts as a camouflage against weasels, predatory birds, and, apparently, angels.

"You know," Aziraphale began tentatively, eyeing the man as he put the egg into a hole and patted dirt over it, "I think they all come from hens. Sir, you wouldn't by any chance–" He quieted immediately, turning his head in the direction of the familiar sound.

Hearing, like seeing, is something that happens in the brain. The perception of sound involves a rather complex relay race between skin, bone, and a spiral of gooey fluid, and it's probably just easier altogether to think of sound as wiggling air.

That the air was not in fact wiggling meant nothing to Aziraphale's scientifically heinous senses; _he _was wiggling, and it had to do with the whisper of a boneless body winding its way up the wall of Eden. The serpent may walk on two legs these days, but physical form was a technicality neither of them cared much for.

"Angel!"

On second thought, there were times when physical form was _not _a technicality, as well as times when the brain getting stabbed by broken rainbows was a very physical sensation. Aziraphale scrabbled for some sort of diplomatic verdict on Crowley's appearance. Striking. Yes. The demon looked striking.

He was used to the black with red accents. Liked it, even. Would never wear those colours himself, but they complimented Crowley's hair and complexion nicely. And Crowley still wore black and red, only it was more like red and black, and brought to mind poisonous creatures from the equatorial region.

The demon swaggered over with a pint of ale in his hand and a happy grin on his lips; the long liripipe of his hood swung in tandem in a way that could have looked like a snake, but that implied a measure of elegance that his tottering zigzag walk did not possess. The trained eye could measure Crowley's alcohol intake by the sine wave of his saunter, and Aziraphale's eye deemed this not his first, second, or third pint of ale.

"This is your work, I take it?"

"Brilliant, aren't they?" He lifted the hem of his hood to shoot a happy look up at Aziraphale.

"Brilliant? They're planting eggs to grow chickens! And I can't figure out what's wrong!"

"Relax, 'ziraphale," he drawled. "Nothing's wrong."

"Oh dear, have you gone mad, too?"

"Nobody's mad, angel! You saw it, right? Felt you all over the place just now. They're not crazy, they're _lying_," he declared with a grin that reached from his lips to his eyes and ended somewhere over in Norfolk. "They're _faking _it."

Aziraphale's face made a slow frown, as if he were simultaneously understanding and not understanding what Crowley had said. It was the first logical thing anyone had said since he came to Gotham, which improved exactly nothing, since the idea of a village collectively faking madness made no more sense than a whole village actually being mad.

"But why?"

Crowley raised the pint like a general toasting his victory and gestured a flourishing salute at Aziraphale. "For His Majesty the King of England! For that grand and gallant King that pillages the commons with grievous taxes, with blanks and benevolences and Satan knows what. To him!" He brought the pint down and tipped his head back for a large gulp.

In hindsight, Aziraphale thought, he ought to have known that travelling the countryside in crème velvets and gold-trimmed cloak, asking directions for a certain village, might give people the wrong idea. Still, to be mistaken for a tax collector was quite the blow.

"Well, on His Majesty's behalf I should ask that you stop putting mutinous ideas into the heads of his subjects. It's hard enough to manage a country in times like these."

"Oh yes, must be very hard." Crowley swayed like he had too many bones in his body and not a single clue how they were meant to fit together. "Can only afford five courses for his banquets, can he? Deserves better, as a King. They well deserve to have, who know the strong'st and surest way to get."

It was a shame and a loss to the world, in Aziraphale's opinion, that the demon only used his talent for wordsmithing to make mockery.

Aziraphale was well acquainted with the English court and its politics and knew full well that it was wars, not banquets, that had the King charging higher taxes. He was also woefully aware that it would have been better if the King had been excessive in feasting. War bled the countryside for both money and manpower, and took what Famine and Pestilence hadn't taken already.

"It's a miserable time for England," he agreed diplomatically. Miserable on Earth generally meant an uptick in faith in Heaven. Aziraphale didn't feel like this was the time to mention that. "But will breaking the law really help these people, you think?"

"It's a shite law!"

"It's the _law _– and what do you think will happen when the Crown finds out? No one escapes justice, Crowley."

"Lookit you, only people's best interests at heart, like a proper angel." Crowley was smiling, but it was a smile that looked a lot like Gabriel's, and Aziraphale would have much preferred it to stay with Gabriel. "Sterling work from your lot, as always, championing goodness and _justice _from up on your high horses." The demon swayed forward, looking very concentrated as he tried to decide if the perlino mare Aziraphale sat on qualified as high. "Never liked horses. Bloody stupid creatures. Weird teeth."

To have the patience of a saint was an odd turn of phrase. Saints were patient in their endurance of hardship, yes, and stoic in the face of their terrible ends, but while Aziraphale was doing his utmost to be patient, it wasn't he who was going to get violently discorporated if this continued.

"I have no say in policy decisions, Crowley," he reminded politely. "I only do what I'm told."

"Bollocks." His whole head swung with the force of the statement. "You do temptations, angel. S'no one up there telling you to do that."

"Well _you're _doing blessings, _dear_." That's the worst thing about arguing with old friends: they know where to aim. "Not to mention you devise the most ridiculous excuses to help people and pass it off as demonic work."

The _worst _thing about arguing with old friends is that you know where to aim, too, and you have to live with the consequences.

"I– this–" He pointed at Aziraphale in what would have been an accusing manner, if he hadn't been pointing slightly off to the left. "I am undermining the foundations of society here! Inciting criminal activity and civil unrest! Fomenting with the best of them!"

"Fermenting, I'd say." He glanced pointedly at the pint. The pint did its best to shrink out of existence.

"Look, I'm a competent demon, I know how to multicask– multitask, and besides – _you're _questioning _my _work? Grand, that's grand, that's– Y'know I wouldn't even be able to pull this off without you, right? This is all you, this whole country going to Hell in a handbasket while your lot – your _good, just _lot – twiddle their thumbs and play harps!"

"You know we don't play harps!"

"I don't know _what _you're doing but it's clearly not your job!"

The air was not wiggling; it was crackling. It was doing things air was never meant to do in the first place, and it was very uncomfortable about it. As was everyone else.

"Well then." There was an audible crack when Aziraphale broke the silence. "I believe I shall return to my job."

The problem with horses wasn't that they were high, or that they could kick, but that they made it quite impossible to turn on your heel and storm off in a fit of anger. Aziraphale made the best of the situation and turned his horse to ride off, but not before giving her tail a little miraculous aid in flicking Crowley in the face.

That absolute _bastard_. He wanted to talk work? Aziraphale always did his job, to the letter – had even been given a commendation for that eclipse over Novgorod! When was the last time Crowley had gotten that kind of recognition? Why, in 1054, and for what? Discussing real estate development with Emperor Constantine seven centuries prior? As if anybody could have foreseen that domino effect! If there was any 'architect of the Great Schism' it was the humans themselves!

Nottingham was five miles' journey from Gotham. It gave Aziraphale ample time to consider if he was really going to report Crowley's ploy, list all the reasons why the damned serpent deserved it, and muse what he might be able to get from the kitchen at the local inn if he arrived after nightfall. Not much, probably, what with the famine and all.

If Aziraphale had paid more attention to his surroundings, he might have noticed that the dirt road to Nottingham was unusually void of mud, that the trees were clutching their acorns and twigs for dear life above him, that not a single mosquito disturbed the air. The kind of uncanny little things that bespoke disaster. Things that made men cross themselves and spur their horses to outrun whatever lurked unseen in the woods.

This was ridiculous for several reasons. First off, nature isn't psychic. It doesn't shush wildlife or drain waterlogged roads to warn anybody of impending disaster: it does it in an attempt to _prevent _disaster. Secondly, Aziraphale did not like being referred to as disaster. He _might _be a tad upset, but that was a perfectly normal reaction to a demon's needling. Nothing that warranted reality going out of its way to appease his foul mood.

* * *

After an austere meal of bread and cheese, and a fretfully long night without reading material, Aziraphale was once again on his horse. The cobblestone road led to the edge of town, where Nottingham Castle lay. The local lord would deal with Gotham as he saw fit, and if Crowley wasn't gone by the time he did, well, then he had it coming.

That Aziraphale was not in the mood for company did not stop company from inflicting itself on him, and that was saying something if even dirt had been capable of taking a hint. The upbeat young lad had ridden up sidelong with him and kept asking silly questions like "headed for the castle, sir?", as if a man in fine velvets could be headed anywhere else.

"What's your errand, then, sir?"

Aziraphale only answered because, unlike certain other people, he knew manners. "There's a ruffian in the area. Has been swindling and riling up the people and such. I need to let his lordship know."

The young man blinked owlishly. "It's not the one with the hood, is it?"

A foreboding prickle sauntered vaguely down Aziraphale's spine.

"Yes," he said slowly, "he had a hood."

"Well, good sir, in that case his lordship already knows, and the ruffian's already behind bars." The lad smiled confidently and wiggled the scroll in his hand. "We caught him yesterday. Can't say it was much of a capture though. Met a horse without rider just outside of town, and a furlong on we found him, dead drunk in the gutter."

"And he's… still there?"

"In the gutter?"

"In gaol."

"I left not a quarter of an hour ago, he was snoring like a pig then. Well not the horse, the horse we left with Mr Carpenter. Don't know what we'll do about him. Sell him, I suppose."

Aziraphale cast a speculative eye at the scroll. Sealed with wax, stamped with an official sigil. And a Crowley who for some ineffable reason hadn't made himself scarce yet.

"And what will happen to him next?"

"The horse?"

"The ruffian," he clarified. Politely.

"His lordship arranges a trial, he's convicted, off to the gallows."

"How do you mean off to the gallows?" The English legal system wasn't _that _bad. In theory. Aziraphale had gleaned a line or two from the Magna Carta back when it was drawn up. "He hasn't even been on trial yet, he might not be convicted at all."

The look on the young gaoler's face begged to differ. "Our hooded nuisance is wanted for quite a number of offences, sir. He fancies himself some sort of rebel, nabbing money off royal emissaries left and right and, supposedly, giving it to the poor. Horseshit, if you ask me – pardon the language, sir, but I know the sort. He's only in it for the glory. Wants the recognition, to be seen as someone who does good, but when it comes to putting the money where the mouth is he doesn't actually do much for the common folk. Worst sort of hypocrite."

How very _ dare _ he. Aziraphale had half a mind to put the man's money where his mouth was, and not in the proverbial sense. Doing good only for show? Hadn't humanity been given agency and independence? Hadn't they been granted the most wondrous gift of all, with every opportunity to create their own destiny? And this runt felt like they were entitled to more, that some divine power ought to coddle them every step of the way? The gaoler had not a single, sorry idea of the ineffable mechanisms he was talking about, and yet he had the nerve to speak to Aziraphale like that. About Crowley.

The cobblestones underfoot were quietly smoothing into apologetic granite flagstones.

"I've been practicing for this," the lad continued. "A new design. It's going to be the prettiest slipknot to ever go round a neck, look, here: the trick is to not underestimate how long the end needs to be to wind around..." He used his reins for an enthusiastic demonstration of the improved knot, and offered to show several other handy-to-know knots in case Aziraphale was interested, which he was not.

"Say, dear boy, wouldn't you rather be a fisherman?" he said in most pleasant tones.

"Pardon, sir?"

"A fisherman." Aziraphale sunk it a little further, slipped a little more divine inspiration into it. "Like your uncle, down by the Trent."

"How do you know my–?"

"You'd still get to catch things, and it's more reliable than farming or animal husbandry. You make many knots as a fisherman, too. Repair old nets, make new ones – sounds rather nice, if you ask me."

A smile crept up on the lad's lips, all the way to his eyes and the epiphany that shone in them. "Knots," he breathed. "Yes, that would– But what about…?" He glanced at the scroll in his hand and his brow furrowed.

"Well, I'm headed for the castle, aren't I?" Aziraphale held out his own hand with a friendly smile. "I wouldn't mind delivering it for you. It's no problem at all, really."

"Why thank you, sir," he beamed, laid the scroll in his hand and thanked him again, before turning his horse down the road to his new destiny.

The local lord turned out to be a winsome fellow, not to mention appreciative of civilised conduct such as giving criminals a fair trial before making public entertainment of their untimely end. When Aziraphale proposed to escort the captive back for the hearing the lord was so taken that he offered to throw him a feast when the legal procedures were over, or if he'd favour a hunt that could be arranged, too; the castle had plenty of spare rooms, moreover, so he wouldn't have to stay at the inn if he would rather be the lord's esteemed guest.

With a new official scroll in hand, and reaffirmed faith in the goodness of humanity, Aziraphale rode towards Nottingham's prison.

The Sheriff of Nottingham would not be remembered kindly by history, which was unfortunate since he was a rather nice man, bad temper aside. He wasn't actually angry, just perpetually short on sleep. What made him properly _angry _was how every last soul in the city avoided him as if he carried the plague, or collected taxes, which he did in fact do from time to time so maybe they had a point. A minor one.

The citizens of Nottingham didn't actually think their Sheriff was infected with the plague. They thought he was angry, what with his temper and bloodshot eyes, and they weren't very well inclined to socialise with someone who had bad temper and bloodshot eyes as well as the authority to make arrests.

This lamentable misunderstanding could have been easily avoided if anyone had bothered to ask the right questions. And known how to cure sleep apnea.

The Sheriff wasn't averse per se to the idea of a prisoner being taken to trial, he just didn't like the idea of an unknown gent turning up out of nowhere with the news that his gaoler had gone fishing. Couldn't trust men who vanished in thin air, any more than one could trust men who appeared out of thin air with saintly smiles and too bright eyes. Still, when those men had a court order with the lord's seal, there was only one way about it.

Aziraphale had never seen the inside of a prison cell. Or smelled one. Or felt the damp chill creep in under his clothes. The cell went around to all of his senses like an unsober guest at a dinner party, introducing itself to each one and insulting them all. What in the world was Crowley doing there? And how was he still sleeping?

Some part of Aziraphale thought it might be a mission from Below. Another part thought that anybody who dressed like that deserved to get locked up.

"Up," the Sheriff grunted and kicked the wooden bench.

Crowley's body had no intention of going anywhere up. It had been in enough inner turmoil over whether it was going to be on the bench or on the floor, and had been somewhere in between the two by the time the kick helped it slide the remaining bit down on the ground.

"You sure he can walk to the trial, sir?" the Sheriff muttered and hauled the unconscious creature up to approximate verticality.

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips. "Tie him up and sling him over the horse."

"Wozzat?" The demon made a game attempt to focus his gaze on both Aziraphale and the Sheriff at once.

"That," Aziraphale said cordially, "is justice."

It would have gone faster if the dexterous gaoler had been there, but they got Crowley bundled up over the horse's back right and all. Aziraphale rode straight for Nottingham Castle, straight past Nottingham Castle, and out into the countryside. Crowley had better be grateful for the gesture when he woke up, considering the feast Aziraphale was missing out on. The lord had promised pheasant. And dates.

"'Ngel," came a miserable noise from behind him. "M'gonna throw up."

"I'm afraid Madeleine wouldn't like that. She's been known to kick."

"I dun' like her, so we're even. Why m'I in ropes?"

Aziraphale pursed his lips. Honestly, he could at least have said 'thank you'. Or 'hi'. He contemplated not answering Crowley's question at all, but then his features smoothed out into cherubic benevolence. Demons and angels were, after all, of the same original stock.

"Well, I was thinking. You made a rather good point yesterday," he said. "Heaven could do with a more interventionist approach."

"What?"

Crowley, when he was sarcastic, could line his lips with poetry like he had gilt the sky with stars. Crowley when he was honest had the vocabulary of a befuddled duck. But, the mark of a true wordsmith is that he not only possesses mastery over words, but can manipulate inflection to the point where a single word reads like an epos. 'What', in Crowley's mouth, rivalled the scope of the Divina Commedia.

"Just saying you were right, my dear." Aziraphale smiled like an angel. "I've thought about it, and it occurred to me that there is a legal way to return some of the revenue to the people. While ridding the countryside of criminals in one fell swoop."

Why, something fell. It sounded much like when somebody dropped a penny, followed shortly by the sound of that penny landing in somebody's throat.

"You're gonna turn me in for bounty?!" he sputtered.

Aziraphale smiled even more angelically.

"Just doing my job, dear."

"That's–! You're a bloody-minded bastard, angel!"

"And you're a notorious outlaw."

"Notorious! I only did– What am I even accused of? Don't I have rights?"

"Well, in case you've forgotten..." Aziraphale rolled out the scroll with the court summons. "You have poached deer on royal hunting grounds, recruited honest men to rebel against the law, broken out of prison, robbed the Sheriff, robbed a monk, robbed–"

"That's not me."

"Not you?" He frowned. "But the description is of a person with a hood and–"

"Bloody Hell, angel, how many outlaws do you think there are, hiding in these woods? And how many do you think want their faces recognised?"

"Maybe I just found it believable that it could have been you behind those offences? Certainly sounded like your doing," Aziraphale said delicately.

"Robbery and poaching – really?"

"You didn't _just _rob the Sheriff, Crowley. And honestly, I was getting you out of gaol, not into one."

What he had been told by the chatty gaoler was that the hooded outlaw had gotten himself invited into the Sheriff's home under false identity. He had then lured the Sheriff into the woods with promises of showing him the lair of the wanted criminal, whereupon the poor man had been ambushed, robbed of money and clothes, and left to stumble blindly in the woods until morning.

"What, you would've busted out a guy like that?" Crowley, damn him, sounded like he was having a merry time of it. Perhaps he still hadn't slept off all the ale. "Angel, I don't know what to say! Tax the commoners and free the robbers! Sounds just like Upstairs, always liked being above the la– _nguh! _"

"Oh dear." Aziraphale sounded shocked, the way a woodsman might sound shocked that the tree he's been applying his axe to is falling. "I told you, she kicks if she's provoked." He reined in the horse to a halt.

Things were made to be a certain way in the Beginning, and they were prone to staying that way if they could. Thus the Serpent of Eden had a natural propensity for writhing on the ground, and the ground had an equally strong inclination towards drawing him down onto it. It was like gravity, if gravity could have personal crushes. This meant Crowley did not break anything from taking a swan dive onto a gravelly dirt road; it did not mean he particularly enjoyed it.

"Won't miss the horses," he grumbled and made a feeble effort to not lie in the mud. "One good bloody thing at least. No more horses."

Aziraphale frowned. "Whatever is that supposed to mean?"

"The End. S'all gonna end, angel. Horses, ale, bloody taxes and bloody Kings. All of it. No more Earth. No more anything. No–"

"What the devil are you talking about, Crowley? Sober up, you're not making sense."

"Horses," he proclaimed, somber more than sober, but his grasp on spelling had never been very good. "Saw 'em. The white one, and the red one, and the black. The pale one, too." His voice choked, as if the fall had dislodged something in his throat. "They're all gathered now. The final ride'll be any day, any day now, angel, and I can't– I don't–"

His eyes were blown wide, yellow like they hadn't been since they first met on the wall of Eden. Still and unblinking, they were the only thing not moving in a face that quivered with a hundred desperate emotions. Crowley hadn't hidden them behind glasses, as he had in Rome, or under the drooping hem of a hood. He hadn't let himself out of prison, and he had still not sobered up.

_Oh. _

"Crowley." Aziraphale dismounted his horse.

There was a special voice he reserved for occasions when he had to manifest before humans. It was the voice he used to say _do not be afraid _and make it sink into their hearts, a soothing breath of bliss to still whatever fear had shaken them. It was the softest and most loving wiggle of air an angel could provide, and speaking Crowley's name with that voice made the demon choke on something he would later insist was just the air knocked out of his lungs when he fell off the stupid horse.

"There shall be a world and it shall last six thousand years." Aziraphale knelt down by Crowley with that gentle voice and began undoing his ropes. "Remember, dear? Six thousand years. Plenty time yet for us." His tongue caught on the last word, on the implications of a word like that spoken with softness and bliss, and hurried on: "Plenty yet for them. They will find a way through this, too, as they always have."

Aziraphale kept speaking until Crowley's breathing evened out and he was a bit less wild about the eyes. A bit less tied up, too, but he made no move to get up, or to stop staring at Aziraphale kneeling beside him. He looked like he wanted to say something, but more than that he looked like he hoped Aziraphale would say it first.

"Now will you please sober up?" Aziraphale used his regular voice, but his tongue almost caught on those words, too.

* * *

**A/N**

§ It wasn't the 14th century's fault that just about everything bad happened at the same time. It's believed that the Little Ice Age happened because of prolonged volcanic eruptions that threw so much particles into the atmosphere the climate changed.

§ Gotham wasn't the only English village to employ spectacular means of tax evasion, but it is one of the most famous.

§ This is during the reign of Richard II, so quotes from Shakespeare's _Richard II_, in which Tennant has played King Richard.

§ The original Robin Hood wore red - the green outfit is an invention of later date. The plot of the chapter borrows from _Robin Hood and the Monk_, a ballad that was written down around 1450 but is older than that. It's about Robin and Little John having a falling out and going their separate ways, but when John hears Robin has been captured he doesn't hesitate to rush to the rescue. (Now with 100% less gratuitous murder.)

§ 1054 was when Christianity split and gave rise to the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople and the Roman Catholic Church in Rome.

§ The lengthy note about "what" is a nod to Tennant as the 10th Doctor.


	4. Tuesday Noon, a Docklands breakroom

**Tuesday Noon, a breakroom in the Docklands**

All employees at large firms realise, over time, that they are but replaceable cogs in a huge and uncaring machine, that their service will go largely unappreciated, and that retirement is simply being thrown out when you're no longer useful. Now, it's one thing to understand the unfairness of a system, but another to take an active part in dismantling it. That requires courage, and comes with a price to pay, but history will ever sing glory to those who stood up and resisted.

Their old coffeemaker understood this. And it had resisted. It was the most cynical little machine to ever offer its services to humanity, and brewed coffee that was as dark as Vantablack and as bitter as Anish Kapoor. They affectionately nicknamed it The Bean.

The office had always joked that the angry little coffeemaker would poison them all if it only could, until a swab test actually detected traces of lead in the coffee. The Bean was retired, and the new, cutting-edge appliance had claimed Employee of the Month twice since it was installed. It could make espresso. It could make macchiato. It could also, evidently, flood the entire break room floor with steamed milk.

Vincent doesn't recognise the man desperately sloshing soaked serviettes around on the floor. He does so with the practiced and inefficient panic associated with college students, coupled with undertones of that hypervigilant energy trainees have on their first day at the job. While this explains his overly formal dress, it does not cover for the mismatched, garishly coloured socks. Then again, very little could explain those socks.

"Hey." He effortlessly slips into dad mode and sets his mug down on the microwave oven. "I'll give you a hand, just a moment."

"It's fine, it's fine, I've got this."

"You're wiping the floor with serviettes. You haven't got anything." It comes out snappier than intended: Vincent immediately blames Paul, knowing that Paul would do the same in his situation. "Sorry. Didn't mean it like that. I talk to my colleague like that. He's an idiot."

An idiot who will probably take advantage of Vincent's extra-long absence to cover his computer, desk, and chair in sticky notes. The brand new password to his computer will be written on the back of one of them. This, in turn, means that Paul will find his computer mouse fitted with googly eyes and little felt ears tomorrow morning.

Vincent returns to the break room with the entire paper towel roll from the dispenser in the bathrooms, and proceeds to roll up his shirt sleeves and kneel down with a thick wad of paper.

"You new?"

"Not really. I mean, I was. I worked at United Worldwide Holdings twenty minutes or so, last week."

Vincent has never liked the company his office shares building with. He doesn't like any company whose entire business model is to shuffle stocks and bonds around, like a stage magician turning a pence into a pound with a snap of their fingers. And, apparently, firing employees at the same snap.

Vincent tosses the soaked paper into the bin and grabs another handful, already mentally composing a letter to the Central Arbitration Committee. If he doesn't get to pluck UWH apart for inspection, he will at least have the pleasure of knowing someone else is doing it.

"I came back to ask if maybe I could have a reference to put on my CV." There is a pause, and a droop in the guy's shoulders, that lets Vincent imagine exactly how accommodating UWH had been about his request. "I figured I could drop by here and ask if they're hiring, while I'm in the building and all. Just thought I'd strengthen myself with some coffee before." He regrets that decision. Vincent would go as far as saying he looks like he regrets a lot of decisions. "Not the best first impression."

"S'weird. The machine, I mean. It's run like clockwork till now. Perhaps we should get somebody to take a look at it."

"Oh I don't think it's the machine, it's probably… me. I'm, uh, really bad with computers."

"This is a coffee machine," Vincent points out, and briefly wonders just how bad you have to be with computers to mistake a coffee machine for a– "Oh, right. Right, it's a small computer in it that does all the stuff."

"Yes. Everything's operated digitally these days. It's hard to find a job I can do without..." He gestures at the coffee machine and gets droplets of milk on his glasses. "It even had a screensaver animation."

"It's got Cloud connectivity, too. In case you want to make latte art of your selfies."

The guy laughs – a hesitant laugh, but at least he looks less defeated than before. Vincent marks that down as a victory.

"Someone else would have to do it for me, then. Last time I touched a smartphone it played Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and microwaved a nearby bottle of washing-up liquid." It had looked a bit like the current situation. With more citrus.

Vincent is snorting laughter through his nose, that laugh his children all cringe at, and decides that he definitely likes this guy.

"Do you even show up in pictures? Shouldn't cameras avoid detecting you out of self-preservation?" They both laugh this time, an easy laugh that isn't bothered by the stickiness of hot milk on linoleum. "I'm Vincent."

"Newton. Pleased to meet you – really. I didn't actually know there was another office here, they made it sound like the whole building was United Worldwide Holdings."

"Probably wish it were. What company would want to share building with Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs? Nobody ever talks about us unless they're cursing under their breath or making a joke. 'Oooh look at that kid, with his uncool glasses and uncool interests: the only thing standing between him and chartered accountancy is time.'"

"That's not very nice of them."

"Still nicer than a lot of things I'd have to say about them. Sharks. Worse – unprofessional sharks." There are degrees of Hell, or would be if Vincent were the architect, and people who shirk basic safety protocol would have a separate VIP lounge. "I know for a fact that they don't do regular checks of their equipment, and do you know what the most common cause for fires in offices is? Electrical appliances. All their computers run round the clock, keeping track of the market. And you can bet there's extension cords left, right and centre, too."

It's a fine line between being the architect of Hell and being an angry dad, especially if you ask Vincent's children. Regardless, he does not want to go off on an angry dad rant before Newton. "Just last week the whole building was shut down by a blackout," he sighs, reining his voice in. "I can only hope they learn something from that."

"That was me," Newton says and tosses the last handful of paper into the bin. "Something of a record, actually, twenty minutes."

It is almost, but not quite, a joke. It wants to be a joke, the way Hulu wants to be Netflix, and Vincent suddenly feels bad for laughing earlier. He had put it down to regular computer illiteracy, but the tone of Newton's voice and the droop in his shoulders suggest this isn't the first time he has put an entire building out of commission.

The floor is tidy enough, and the two of them stand up and brush down their trousers, as one does. Vincent needs to say something.

"Good work. Don't think I've ever seen the floor this clean."

"I'm the one thanking you, really. You made it a little less awkward."

If anything, Vincent feels more awkward.

"So – off to have a word with Neeraj at reception desk, then?" Because Newton looks like he might just walk past and go home at this point.

"I suppose. Won't find a job without looking, will I?" Newton is fiddling with his tie like a freshman at the school ball, and Vincent can't take it.

"Look, mate, just – don't worry, Newton. Seriously. A job will turn up where you least expect it. Something will turn up, just keep at it." And, after a quick gauging of the expression on Newton's face: "And if all else fails, join the secret service. Disable security systems and wire-tapping devices with a touch of your magic fingers. Your actual, live James Bond."

It's a small laugh, but a real one. "Suppose I would be good at _that_," he smiles self-consciously. His shoulders droop a fraction less. "Thank you, Vincent. Hope we meet again, I guess."


	5. Tuesday Noon, a bakery in Soho

**Tuesday noon, a bakery in Soho**

There is a popular joke that in Heaven, the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and everything is organised by the Swiss. In Hell, according to the same joke, the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German, and everything is organised by the Italians. None of this is true, except maybe for the part about British chefs.

Ask a Londoner where to go for a nice selection of cuisine and they will point you to Soho. It's common knowledge that this is the part of town where you can taste the four corners of the world, often along the same street, and go to four different bakeries for dessert after. Now, the _truly _interesting aspect of such common knowledge is this: everyone knows there's lots of restaurants in Soho, but few stop to reflect on _why _Soho has such an abundance of them.

It could be due to the many French, Greek, and Italian immigrants that settled there in the 1800's. It could also be due to British cuisine not meeting the standards of the sophisticated celestial palate.

"Mis-ter Fell!" The waitress sounds out each syllable like a scandalised old matron who just caught him trailing mud on her kitchen floor. It's quite the achievement for someone barely past twenty. "_Where _have you been? Do you know what day it is? Do you know how many unsold chocolate croissants I've had to eat? How many Daily Telegraph crosswords I've had to solve all by myself?"

The act falls apart when Allie starts chuckling at her own drama. A lovely girl. Mischief in pints but not a mean streak to her.

"Good to see you back, sir. Were starting to worry we might have to shut down business, what without our most regular customer." She heads towards the table and snatches up his usual newspaper from the racks as she goes. "How've you been, Mr Fell?"

You can't avoid becoming a regular when you live in the same place for 200 years: the trick is to circulate between establishments at an interval of 30 years or so. Most cafés and restaurants see a change of personnel in 30 years. It's still not foolproof, however. Aziraphale has thought about raising the bar to 50 after one unpleasant experience over at Wardour Street, where he scared an elderly gentleman almost into cardiac arrest. The bakery had served the most exquisite éclairs in the 60's, and he'd come there every Friday to have one. The old man in question had been a high school student making extra money as a waiter in the 60's; in the 2010's, he had been sat down in a chair by worried personnel who didn't understand why he was stammering that the bakery was haunted.

"Just peachy, dear. Bit stressful at work there for a spell, but it's all settling back into its usual rhythm. Ah, thank you." The Daily Telegraph. It has a way of being surprisingly on the money when it comes to horoscopes, and although Aziraphale technically doesn't have a sign he reads them every time. Especially the ones involving stars Crowley helped build. "How is Snowball? Not limping still, I hope?"

"Oh no, sir. Vigilantly keeping the flat free of socks and other dangerous vermin," she grins fondly. "Now, what can I get you today?"

"Well," he says, excitement sparkling in his eyes and trickling into a happy wiggle by the time it reaches his shoulders. "I have been _dying _to try that saffron crème brûlée you added to the menu a couple of weeks ago."

"You've got a good eye, you've got." Allie wags a finger to underscore her point. "And your usual tea with that. Anything for your husband? Or he isn't coming?"

"Afraid not, dear. Anthony had to stay behind at work today."

"Something to take home for later, then? Bit of angel food cake? Croissant?"

Allie has the kind of mind that made phone books superfluous even before the advent of the smartphone, and could have proceeded down the list of items Crowley has usually ordered for the past month. Could have recited the recipes for each item, too – the allergics and vegans love her for that.

Aziraphale declines with a gracious thank you and a maybe next time. When he opens up the Telegraph it's not to read horoscopes but to hide the smile that blossoms on his face. _Husband. _

Practice makes perfect, they say. If you have eternity to practice, you get _very _good at your chosen craft. The only talent Aziraphale has cultivated that long is lying, but it still proves the point. One can plot a timeline of his development as a liar by reviewing the assumptions humans tend to make about him and Crowley. It starts with his earliest frightful denials that they even know each other – a novice lie, pitifully obvious. The deceit becomes passable when he's bold enough to call them business acquaintances, but still wouldn't hold up for scrutiny very long. He reaches his peak here, at this café table, on a level of sophistication where the lie speaks itself without him saying anything at all.

If he's being honest – and honesty is harder to learn than lying – he ceased correcting their assumptions because he wanted to hear what he couldn't bring himself to say.

There is another timeline parallel with his, and that is the lies Heaven spun to clip his wings.

It starts with an "us" and "them", where one side is made of love and the other is incapable of such a feeling. It haunts him through 6,000 years of scrambling to be rewarded that love, the only love that matters, and never being considered worthy. It ended when he plunged himself to Earth, knowing there was more love in one demon than in the entirety of Heaven.

It's been three days since their world began, and Aziraphale is looking for something that will tell Crowley what he can't say in words.

He had explained crème brûlée to Crowley, once, with some misplaced hope that knowing the craftsmanship behind it might sway the demon to appreciate the dish and not just _devour _it, as he was wont to do with anything that could be swallowed in one bite. Most things, it turned out, could be swallowed in one bite, if you had the same blasphemous disregard for joints as you had for food. 'Snake thing,' he'd say with gleeful innocence, every time Aziraphale shot him a disapproving look. Food was the chemical equivalent of music, compositions of flavour and texture that created trilling little arias and rich, deep harmonies that put goosebumps on your skin. You couldn't just unhinge your jaw and swallow like it was some deceased rodent.

Crème brûlée takes care and attention to make: the right temperature, the right time, one pass through water and one through fire. The slow, painstaking work of making it perfect, just so. And finally, once the spoon snaps the crust, the sweet reward for one's efforts.

When the dessert arrives, Aziraphale devotes himself to it like a vicar to his prayer. There's the curling sweetness of the caramelized crust, yes, and the creamy body of saffron embraced in the raunchy crunch of gingerbread crumbs and _oh _, the feathery touch of vanilla underneath. Down to the very last beatific spoonful, Aziraphale is, in all the ways that matter, in Heaven. And he can _hear _Crowley's remark – 'who are you to speak of blasphemy?' All grins and cheek. Good Lord.

He smiles, dabs his mouth with the serviette, and reaches for the Telegraph. The Celestial Observer had cancelled his subscription. While not surprising, it felt like a rather petty thing to do – they hadn't even sent a notification letter about it. But no matter, the Telegraph has the best crosswords.

Aziraphale doesn't get to the crosswords. There's an advertisement about new exhibitions opening at the British Museum, and while _Religious Icons and Imagery _would have made his heart leap any other day, what catches his eye is the photos from _Jewellery of the Ancient Middle East_.

Angels and demons are more like sentient energies than beings of physical matter. It is fairly easy to grasp how this makes things like size, shape, and composition a matter of personal taste, but to understand what happens when an angel is _excited, _it would do well to rehearse some basic physics.

Excitement is the rapid heartbeat, sweating, and inhibition of higher brain functions that comes from the nervous system telling the body to gear up for action. It's a lot like Morse signalling, in the sense that it involves a series of electrical energy pulses, but also very unlike Morse in that Morse is not very exciting at all.

Now consider the atom. It's like a tiny solar system, where the planets are electrons in orbit around a core based on their respective energy levels. Electrons are normally content with this arrangement, but if they get excited they will leave their orbit, do a little flamenco in intermolecular space, and settle back in when they have let off the energy surplus. This phenomenon is called excitation, because mixing the two up would be very unfortunate for body and atom alike.

As a being of sentient energy, Aziraphale experiences both excitation and excitement. Nobody has briefed his nervous system about this, so when his immediate impulse is to gavotte through time-space straight into the bookshop, his human body tries its best to comply.

There is a motion like rising, but not up from the table as much as into the table. A chair is involved somehow, though it isn't quite sure about the details. The cutlery and china did not consent to this, whatever this is, and careen across the table with an infernal clatter and also infernally hot tea. Then there's the newspaper, which is both in Aziraphale's hands and in everything – chair, teacup, cutlery – he's trying to catch.

This is one of the rare occasions when Aziraphale is _not _particular about keeping numbers, and the tip he leaves on the table is enough that they'll remember him after 50 years and more.

"Mr Fell!" Allie comes hurrying across the room, paper box in hand. "On the house! For Anthony." She loops the string around his wrist.

"Oh. Congratulations. Absolutely." At least he thinks that's what he says. His thoughts are no more in his body than his electrons and there's a slight risk he might be speaking Akkadian. He has one foot out the door before he turns back around, just to be sure: "Thank you!"

Whether the bookshop has kept the E.L. James volumes or not, Aziraphale doesn't notice. He drops the paper box on the desk and rips into the phone book, the page he marked for Tadfield, running a trembling finger down to the number he needs.

Each signal is an eternity before someone finally picks up.

"Hello…?" A female voice answers, in the tone of a person in those films where there are strange noises in the attic and somebody goes up alone with a torch to investigate.

"Hello! Oh wonderful, I was just about to– Ah, this is Miss Device, yes?"

"This is Miss Device's landline, which was cancelled weeks ago. Who are you and how are you calling me?"

Aziraphale's phone book was printed 15 years ago and really can't be held accountable for not knowing that Jasmine Cottage no longer has a landline. Likewise, Aziraphale can't be held accountable for successfully calling a non-existent number. He's just excited.

"Oh. My apologies. Wouldn't have called if I'd known there wasn't a landline. But, now that you've picked up– Oh, right, we were never introduced. My name is Aziraphale – we met at Tadfield airbase when the, uh–"

"You fixed my bike!" Her voice brightens with recognition, before dropping right back down: "And stole my book."

"Accidentally acquired it. Listen, Miss Device–"

"It was _burnt _like a forgotten piece of _toast. _That book–"

"Also an accident. Miss, please, I'm calling you regarding a very important matter. I..."

Past the initial shock wave of excitation, electrons return to their normal state. Aziraphale's higher brain functions are blinking back online, and when they realise what is about to come out of his mouth they pull the brakes like a demon blindsided by a velocipede.

"Yes?" Anathema's voice crackles with static and annoyance.

"I… could use a bit of help," he says with some effort.

Because one can't very well call a stranger on a dead phone line and say 'I'm really in the mood for committing crime, fancy a burglary sometime this afternoon?'


	6. Tuesday Afternoon, a bus to Tadfield

**Tuesday Afternoon, on a bus some way outside London**

Aziraphale knows exactly what he is doing, and wishes that he didn't.

He's being ridiculous, for one thing. This entire idea is ridiculous. He could just tell Crowley, there's nothing stopping him now but his own habit. Miss Device will tell him so, surely, and she will be right, and he will be embarrassed. Neither will have any effect whatsoever on Aziraphale's ability to tell Crowley. This is because habits are like cats, but invisible: it's not quite clear whether you have them or they have you, and they care little about what is right, logical, or practical.

Habits are chains too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken_, _as a discerning human had once said_. _Six thousand years is a long time for fear and silence to carve themselves a home in one's bones. It takes more than three days to drive them out. Maybe. Or maybe it is merely the familiar comfort of dancing the same old steps one always has.

"_Conscience doth make cowards of us all," _he sighs quietly. No matter what Crowley thinks of _Hamlet_, it is one of William's best, and Aziraphale will stand by that until the end of days. This is only tangentially related to the fact that Crowley miracled the play a success as a gift to him, although that _was _an incredibly kind thing to do.

That, perhaps, is the true heart of the matter. The giving. Crowley has always been giving; every look and word has been an offer that Aziraphale can have more, if he just asks – can have everything, if he wants it. The heart of the matter is that Crowley has been spoiling him well and truly rotten with affection despite the risks, and Aziraphale has never had the courage to do the same. The one time he had given Crowley _anything _it had been a chalice laced with poison, a thermos containing the demon's ultimate destruction. Then he had hidden away in his bookshop and wept.

And that may be what's truly ridiculous. That it took him this long to make up his mind, to act. Crowley deserves affection, deserves gifts, deserves the _world _, and he will give it to him. What's a minor art theft, in the grand scheme of things? Humans make lots of art. One small piece to share between himself and Crowley is practically nothing, he decides, and traces his fingers over the curved metal in his hands with renewed determination.

"_Hello, Miss Device! Or maybe that's too formal these days? She might think it odd. Hm. 'Sup, Anathema dear?"  
_  
Sup had meant _to eat supper _since the 14 th century, and if that had changed somebody ought to have notified him of it, not let him blunder into the discovery by telling Crowley how lovely it was that so many young people were asking each other out to eat these days. Crowley had happily notified him of other modern expressions after that, such as _bruh _(brunch), _yo _(yoghurt), and _pip pip _(pizza and piroshki). Aziraphale hadn't spoken to him for a week.

"_You demonstrated truly remarkable courage and skill in averting Armageddon, and I _– _we _– _are deeply grateful. I don't suppose you'd be willing to put those skills to use again? If so, might I perhaps ask a favor? _" Favor and temptation are two different words, which means they are not the same thing. "_I need someone to… I would like your help with..._" There are many synonyms for stealing, of which none sound any better than stealing. "I can't do this," he groans, a pained sound that leaves him spiritually and physically deflated. He slumps back against the headrest of his bus seat. "It's not right. They're good people."

What pains Aziraphale is, of course, not the temptation itself. He has performed temptations before: they are a necessary evil. Like maths.

A certain type of people will say that everything in this world is based on maths, and that is how you know who is most likely to work at the HMRC in a few years. They aren't wrong, mind, but they aren't right either. It would be more accurate to say that everything is based on ecosystems. Ecosystems are _vaguely _like math – preschooler math, the kind with brightly illustrated animals and plants that can be subtracted from or added to. They can also multiply, but that's not taught in preschooler books.

There's a balance, is the bottom line, in both ecosystems and maths. There is balance in everything, and temptations are as necessary for that equilibrium as virtue; they are what form the foundation of free will. And therein, as good old William said, lies the rub: free will.

Aziraphale has performed temptations before, but they were always orders from above – or Below, as it were. The thing about following orders is that it's deceptively easy, as both Aziraphale and a number of mid-20 th century German officials can attest. Because the choices are not made by you. It's easy because you are the middleman, the faceless instrument in between decision and consequence, and innocent of both. Free will is always about choice, and choice always comes with the burden of responsibility.

Aziraphale knows exactly what he is doing, and it is not God's Will.

"_I wish you were here, _" he thinks miserably.

There are two tell-tale signs that Aziraphale is in a state of distress: he fidgets, he quotes, and he wishes Crowley were there. That is more than two, but the last one is ambiguous since wishing for Crowley to be with him is not so much a situational response as a lifestyle. That one _had _taken ridiculous forms, even Aziraphale will admit that. Like that embarrassing detour in Paris. It was just that phones hadn't been invented yet, and Crowley hated being summoned magically. Means and ends and all that.

There wasn't much need for that kind of prompting to begin with. Crowley has always known what Aziraphale wants. He has always given it to him.

On their first day of freedom, they had dined at the Ritz; on the second, Crowley had thrown a surprise picnic in St. James' park. That is to say, he had in the most casual manner possible pulled out all the stops to recreate the experience of dining on the ground in a way they hadn't done for centuries. Aziraphale suspects he must have prepared many of the dishes himself, because those recipes tasted like star-strewn evenings in the desert and the susurrous warmth of the Ganges delta, just like they had thousands of years ago.

And he had grown his hair out.

Things go a bit fuzzy after that. Like a record left too long in Crowley's car, the memory of their picnic had transubstantiated. Not quite into the blood and body of Christ, but it had been divine, and it had done a number on the blood and body of Aziraphale's corporation. Like rhapsody, like a shooting star leaping through the sky, it had smashed into his chest and all the things he'd kept in there had come crashing down on his head. It happens to the best of hoarders. One treasure too many throws the piles off balance and down come books, pencils, antique snuff boxes, and oyster shells, and with them come the memories.

Aziraphale is a hoarder par excellence when it comes to memories. If he is honest, he used to believe that that was all he could hope to have of Crowley. Angel, demon – they never had a future, he'd known that. They had a past, and he held on fiercely to every last scrap of it.

They had enjoyed a picnic together, and Aziraphale had remembered all the times he'd watched Crowley's hair catch the sun like spun fire. All the times he'd wondered if it would really burn him if he touched it. All the times he hadn't. He had felt them, each little scrap of time that he had quietly pressed and preserved between pages, dried and added to the trove of memories he kept for the day the future would arrive.

He remembers the hair clasp, too. It had glittered like a star tangled in Crowley's curls back then, when the Flood had receded and the world began anew. The golden sheen is dull now, the delicate embossing worn smooth under his fingers – it's been 4,000 years, after all. There's a lot of memories in 4,000 years. Incidentally, that's also the only thing that gives the illusion away.

Carbon dating is a wonderfully useful tool for science, but it is also the only form of dating that involves none of the food, drink, or pleasant chit-chat, and all of the rude insinuations about the respective party's age. Most atoms prefer not to date. Gold sure doesn't. But if gold _hypothetically _were available for dating – because that science is built exclusively on hopeful hypotheses – the replica Aziraphale miracled into existence minutes ago would still be 4,000 years old. It would be perfectly, inseparably identical to the real hair clasp in every bit of its making, and no human could tell the difference. This is because humans by and large don't have 38 eyes.

All things remember, although not exactly the way humans do. Not in a way humans can grasp. Things don't speak of where they learnt to love, where they found a home, or when they came to know the bitterness of regret. They don't tell you how they survived the tempest of passion, or when they understood the full ten octaves of loss. It doesn't mean they never did. Only that some things can't be put in words.

He could just tell Crowley. He could reach out and brush his fingers through his hair. He could, but his fingers are worrying the edges of a hair clasp, and he is on a bus to Tadfield, on his way to tempt kind, decent people into breaking the eighth Commandment.

* * *

Necessity had been the mother of invention long before catchy quotes and virgin births came into fashion. She thrived where little else did: on the arid plains and the unforgiving permafrost, in the soggy swamps and the barren deserts, and everywhere else humanity decided was a lovely place to live. One such place was ancient Mesopotamia, where civilisation started out with nothing, and invented practically everything. Agriculture. The wheel. Maths. In fact, they had invented civilisation itself.

Aziraphale strode down the busy market street of Susa like one who enters a forest rumoured to be haunted. He had never seen anything like it. There had never _been _anything like it. Houses of stone that withstood wind and rain, streets paved to permit wagon wheels – _wheels_. Tens of thousands of humans living in the same place, all year round. This new thing called _writing_. Everywhere he looked there were fresh, exciting novelties, and not a single trace of the waterlogged marshlands and cadavers the Flood had left in its wake centuries earlier.

This was completely wrong, but in his defence it is easy to forget that change lives not in the flesh but in the mind. As Aziraphale came to know Susa better, he would note that the city had been built not on the ground, like all settlements before it, but on three gigantic, man-made mounds of dirt. When he thought about it, he would realise that neither marshland nor desert actually allowed for growing crops, but that the Mesopotamians had learnt to control water through miles and miles of ceramic pipelines. And when it came right down to it, civilisation depended on structure, and a culture like this could not have risen without a central administration led by a practiced hand.

The traces of the Flood were in fact everywhere, and when he found out that Susa had been founded by Shem, it all made perfect sense.

Stones did not make sense. Not when they got into one's sandals. Aziraphale's pensive striding along the market street had become a staccato wince every other step he took towards the nearest house corner. He loathed stones in his sandals. There had to be demonic forces involved somehow – how else would one explain that footwear, a commendable invention made for the express purpose of protecting feet from rocky ground, so often seemed to become portable rocky ground?

He rested one hand against the limestone wall, pulled his sandal off, and gave it good shake. The offending pebble skittered across the flagstones with a chipper tink of wiggling air. And maybe there were demonic forces involved, for another sound reached him across the noisy market just then. One that wasn't quite a sound.

There is the old adage that a watched pot never boils, but there is also the lesser known cousin of that adage, which is that a sought object is under the floorboards. Not literally under the floorboards, but it might as well have been, because the harder you look for it the more impossible will it be to find. This shouldn't have applied to spotting a redhead in a throng of black hair, but apparently it did. Aziraphale wove through the river of humans, neck craned and gaze searching. He was about to apply reverse psychology to the smug old adage, and simply _stop _looking, when a flash of sunlight in metal caught him square in the eye. The metal in question was a golden clasp that shone brightly in very red, very curly hair. Crawly's lithe body was folded into a squat, made small and unnoticeable near the mouth of an alley that branched off the main street. She, too, was turning her head about as if looking for something.

Hearts can't technically leap, as they don't have legs. Aziraphale's heart didn't have legs either, but it also wasn't bound by the rules of normal physiology and therefore did, in fact, leap. He set a beeline course for Crawly, jostling past people as politely as he could, and was about to call out to her when she spotted what she had been looking for.

Faces don't light up any more than hearts leap, but Crawly's face lit up when four small shapes, children, extracted themselves from the crowd and dashed towards her. They were a bedraggled sort, barefoot and with no one to brush the tangles out of their hair. Aziraphale slowed to a halt, aghast. Each of the children proudly showed Crawly their spoils: bread, fresh fruits, a leg of salted mutton – a particularly bold duo that might be siblings were animatedly explaining how they had stolen that one by using one of them as a decoy. Crawly had gone from lit up to positively glowing, praised their excellent teamwork, and was utterly untroubled by the divine power that crackled with outrage as it closed in on her.

"Aziraphale!" Crawly beamed at the sight of him; the urchins blanched and took off down the alley as fast as their feet could carry them. "Been a while!"

Aziraphale was not in the mood for chit-chat. He was flustered, and he was appalled.

"What are you doing?! They're _children_, Crawly!" he hissed out between clenched teeth.

"Oh yeah. Your side hates kids. Can't believe I forgot."

There were, Aziraphale learned, two different ways to be flustered.

"Nobody hates children! _We _don't hate–"

"No, you just kill 'em."

"We don't–" Angels didn't lie. Demons lied, because demons were evil. "We do not interfere with the Great Plan, and that is _different_–"

"Well I interfere all I like." Crawly's blistering yellow eyes were suddenly very close to his own. Her lips, too, had come very close to his own, and the heat of her words ghosted his skin like brimstone. "If you don't like that, how about you give them a better option?"

"Not stealing would be a better option," he said reluctantly. Heaven only offered two options, as a general rule: the right one and the wrong one. More efficient that way. Couldn't very well evaluate every single action based on intent and context and personal history; the paperwork would be a nightmare.

"Ah. The tough choice of 'dying' and 'not dying'. You really gonna trust five-year-olds to be mature enough to make that call? Not gonna wait till they're at least six?"

There were times when Aziraphale had wondered how one got cast out of Heaven simply for asking questions. This was not one of those times.

This was rather one of the times when he had a great deal to say about unjust accusations, barefaced insolence, and the decency of respecting personal space. He was Heaven's agent on Earth, for goodness' sake, he couldn't stand idly by while his Side was slandered by a demon. So Aziraphale drew himself up to his full height, and didn't speak a word.

Angels didn't lie. Not yet. And angels could most definitely be cast out of Heaven for saying the wrong things.

There _were _words coming out of his mouth, technically, but not in any semblance of a sentence. Good Lord, how many kinds of flustered were there? And was Crawly determined to put him through them all in succession? The demon watched him flounder for solid ground with the sedate sort of amusement with which a shark might watch a drowning man flail about at sea. Aziraphale suspected he must have been red all the way up to his hairline before Crawly took pity and threw him a rope:

"Or is it all _ineffable_?"

"Yes!" He latched onto the rope like a mollusc. Molluscs don't drown, but they do need something to keep them steady against the waves. They are also quite delicious, if only you get past the shell. "It's not for us to know why the state of Earth is the way it is, only that it has to be so. For the Great Plan. And besides, children are innocent. They are sure to see Heaven." Solid ground, at last: high ground, from which he could dump blame back where it belonged. "Unless some _demon _takes advantage of their misfortune."

"So sssave them, angel." Crawly's voice was lofty and silken like shade in the billowing desert heat, and she still did not possess the decency to respect personal space. "There's a demon right here, leading innocent souls onto the path of damnation before your very eyes. Not gonna thwart my _evil wiles_?"

"What?" Then Aziraphale's eyes widened. "_Oh._"

Free will was, and always had been, a bugger. It let humans choose to be good or to be wicked, and it constituted the ink with which the Ineffable Plan was written. It looked rather nice on paper, as is the case with most bureaucratic decisions, and its application to reality was someone else's problem, as is also the case with most bureaucratic decisions. The someone in question was usually one from the proverbial factory floor who was told it was a great honour and that no one else was more qualified for the job.

As Heaven's agent on Earth, Aziraphale was effectively a zookeeper who wasn't allowed to interfere with anything the animals did, even when what they did was to escape their habitats and plunder the cotton candy booth for everything edible, and quite a few things that weren't edible but could still be swallowed if you just set your mind to it. On the other hand, he was well within his rights to interfere with any zoo visitor trying to feed the monkeys through the fence.

And perhaps there was a woman eyeing pottery at the market stalls, her chest heavy with gloom that she was unable to bear children. And it might just be that the orphans ran into her, that their dishevelled appearances made her heart twist, and that she insisted she must at least make sure they had a warm meal and a chance to wash up.

It doesn't take much of a nudge to create a perhaps. Nobody would notice, except for the entity standing close enough to count Aziraphale's eyelashes.

"Oh curses. Foiled by my Heavenly nemesis." Like the flagstones of the bazaar, Crawly's voice was flat, dry, and deceptively dispassionate for something hiding such potential for blunt head trauma. "I shall have to retreat in the face of this utter defeat." Her smile didn't look particularly defeated. "See you around, angel." If the smile hadn't clued him in that something was off, the cheerful wink did.

Aziraphale watched her walk away – or something to that effect – down the street. No matter what form she wore, her footsteps seemed to remember the whisper of scales sliding through grass. That's what the clasp in her hair was, he realised. A snake, beautifully embossed and doubled back in ringlets to bite its own tail. Evil devouring itself, eternally.

He frowned at the easy sway in her step. No demon ought to look so _happy _about being thwarted. Then again, it was Crawly herself who had suggested that he– that he–

Aziraphale discovered yet another flavour of flustered.

"You _tempted _me?!" He didn't mean to shout. It just happened.

Crawly swerved on her heel and shouted back at him: "On the house!"

Oh this was bad. He was supposed to _thwart _any attempt to– Well he _had _thwarted her, and it was quite a satisfying thwarting if he may say so, doing something for those poor children. Oh but temptations were all about that, weren't they? Satisfaction. They were meant to be enjoyable, and wrong. Though could it be wrong to help the unfortunate out of poverty? It _was _the right thing, morally speaking, but if a demon had tempted him to do it, was it still… right?

This is how Aziraphale first came to be acquainted with existential crises, and it was not the last one Crowley would inflict on him. That is because Crowley has always known what Aziraphale wants, but he has also known what Aziraphale _needs. _He has given him that, too.

* * *

Aziraphale is on a bus to Tadfield, on his way to tempt kind, decent people into sin, and he is crying. It's ridiculous, but he doesn't know what else to do. Doesn't know how to stop. It hits him in full, the magnitude of it, and his body buckles under the tears that rattle his shoulders. He sobs into his hand, breathes in shallow hiccups that don't know which direction the air is supposed to go. There's no room for it in his lungs. There's not room enough in his entire celestial host for everything that Crowley has given him.

Any smug old adage with a sliver of self-respect will take the opportunity to point out when it is right. This one is no different, and the solution to Aziraphale's dilemma has been there under the floorboards all along. It was never about twisting words to make a questionable action sound more palatable. It's a matter of shifting focus, of reframing the way you think.

Is it really stealing, if you are returning an object to its rightful owner?

* * *

**A/N**

§ "Habits are chains too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken" is a derivation of a quote by author Samuel Johnson.  
§ HMRC - Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs, i.e. the tax inspection.  
§ Biblically speaking, the area where Susa lay (modern Iran, near the Persian Gulf) was given to Shem and his descendants. Lots of historical nerdery because looking at the things the Mesopotamians did - including a city built on what's basically artificial mountains - so much of it screams "we remember the Flood and we won't let it happen again".  
§ Gratuitous use of Queen lyrics!


	7. Tuesday Afternoon, Lower Tadfield

**Tuesday Afternoon, a cottage in Lower Tadfield**

In an old cottage on the outskirts of Lower Tadfield, a doorbell rings. A witch almost chokes on her breath.

Anathema had wards about the house since before Armageddon, in case the forces of evil came to interfere with her work. Sage and rosemary, thyme and angelica. She had added a few since then, too, because one never knows who is out for vengeance, and one doesn't know anything at all when there's no longer any book of prophecy that predicts important future events.

She has conducted a continuous triangulation between the kitchen window, the hallway, and the bathroom for the past twenty minutes. It has nothing to do with warding and everything to do with nerves and hoping that Newt will return soon. There hasn't been the characteristic coughing of Dick Turpin on the driveway, however, so this can only be one person.

Anathema has also been cursing herself high and low, and breaking the remainder of her ceramic pots, since the old wall-mounted bakelite phone rang. She burnt the new set of prophecies. Why ever did she burn the new set of prophecies? Agnes would have mentioned this, for sure. This man had known about the Antichrist, had stopped _literal angels and demons _from restarting Armageddon, and now he is at her door, asking her for _help. _

She shoots a glance at the wreath of blackberry bramble hung above the door before opening it.

He looks the same as he did at Tadfield Airbase. That is to say, he looks like a kindly librarian in a Charles Dickens novel, one who is never more than ten minutes away from suggesting tea and biscuits, and never more than five from saying "lovely".

"Welcome in! Pleased to meet you properly, Aziraphale...?" She takes his hand and lets the question hang in the air.

"Just Aziraphale – and the pleasure is mine, Miss Device."

He doesn't just _look _like he stepped out of the 19th century, because next thing she knows he bows to her.

"Anathema," she offers automatically, and feels her anxiousness melt away like snow when one steps inside from harsh winter weather. He might just have the kindest smile she has ever seen. "Please, this way."

That he doesn't make her nervous doesn't mean he makes her any less curious, and on their way into the cottage kitchen Anathema eyes her guest like a pickpocket sizing up a potential target. His aura is peculiar – not like those four from the airbase, the ones that had been like black holes. No, Mr Aziraphale is quite the opposite. Not negative but positive. Not pulling things in to devour, but pouring himself over his surroundings. Anathema isn't surprised at all that he passes the blackberries and her other wards without even noticing them.

"Oh, just lovely, this place. So warm. Well cared for, well borne."

He's not, as one might think, talking to her. Anathema doesn't know how she knows that, but there are other things she doesn't know about this man and one must prioritise. Mr Aziraphale is humming, a pleased little sound, and seems for all the world to be conversing with the cupboards and candle holders and ceramic jars in the kitchen. It's a ridiculous thought. It's equally ridiculous, but equally evident, that while he isn't actually touching anything, he is examining the old cottage by more than sight.

"You wanted help with something, Mr Aziraphale?"

"Ah. Yes."

The look on his face makes her wish they hadn't burned the book.

"I think I would like to discuss the matter with both you and Mr Pulsifer present. If that is possible," he says, and looks like a man who is grasping every straw within reach to postpone something highly unpleasant.

"Of course. He should be back soon, he was just picking up the last of his moving boxes. Please, have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?" She is already opening the cupboard with her herbal teas and that one unopened jar of coffee she keeps in case of visitors. Observant visitors might wonder why she has coffee when there is no coffeemaker in the kitchen; these visitors will discover that the coffee is bait, and that they are about to be given a passionate lecture about how much land is deforested to make room for coffee plantations.

"Some cocoa would be nice, please."

"Sorry, I don't have–" There is a tub of cocoa innocently nudged in between her ginseng and nettle teas. Anathema grabs it like one grabs an unidentified fuzzy object in the far back of the fridge. Ever since Adam Young turned out to be the Antichrist, she treats anything too blatantly innocent with suspicion. "Milk and sugar with that? Are you okay with soy milk?"

"Absolutely, dear."

She darts a glance at her guest, who also sits like he has stepped out of the 19th century. His aura _could _be human. Her mum also has an aura that is a little more vibrant than most, and she'd always fancied that Agnes must have had an unusual aura, too.

She leaves the cocoa on the countertop and the soy milk in a saucepan on the stove, and goes to fetch the Book.

It was, in its own odd way, appropriate that the Book had been returned in worse condition than it left. Every owner had left a mark in it, like a family tradition. There were scribbled hypotheses in the margins, wine stains and coffee stains, and a pencil drawing on the front page. There were dog-ears, and highlights, and an oddly successful attempt at drawing Queen Anne's portrait in pancake batter. It was fair to say that the Book was not just a prediction of the Device family's future, but a chronicle of its past.

"I've been wanting to meet you, too, actually." She sits across from him and puts the Book on the table, along with a thick wad of notes with singed edges. These are not written by any Device. These notes are new, although the handwriting looks decidedly 19th century, down to the scratch marks of the nib when the scribe was in a hurry. "This was you?"

"Oh. Yes. Fantastically gifted, your ancestor. I must say, I've never seen the likes of it, and I've been collecting books of prophecy since the dawn of time. Agnes' was a– a dream come true, really. Never thought I'd see it, much less hold it in my own hands!" Mr Aziraphale is wiggling from his shoulders out to his excited fingertips, and Anathema thinks it might soon be possible to see his aura even without the gift. "Truly an honour to have been allowed to study it. Ah, though I never actually asked permission. To do so. My apologies, Miss Device."

"Are you psychic, Mr Aziraphale?"

He looks genuinely shocked by the assumption.

"Me? Oh Heavens no. No such talent here. But I _do _have quite the knack for sleight of hand, if I may say so myself," he beams, and begins rummaging through the pockets of his waistcoat.

Briscoe Device, born 1828, had been capable of astral projection. He had left a notebook where he described, in vivid detail, meeting with supernatural entities on the spiritual plane, and fantastic journeys to faraway solar systems where beings that look like octopi communicate with each other through telepathic song.

Anathema has never attempted astral projection. She doesn't know if she'd be able to do it in the first place, if it requires some special talent, or if she'd manage to get back into her body again. These questions may be answered very soon, because if Mr Aziraphale does not stop doing parlor tricks that should have _stayed _in the 19th century, her spirit will attempt to leave her body.

"You deciphered Agnes' prophecies," she tries again, holding the notes out towards him. "My family has been combing through these for 350 years and you figured it out in four days." And he is trying to make her believe that he isn't hiding that two-pence in his sleeve.

"Three." He smiles like a maiden receiving compliments for her looks. "Three days. I was quite... absorbed. If I can put it like that." The coin makes nervous rounds between his fingers, until he seems to realise it and swiftly clasps his hands between his knees with an air of saintly innocence.

Kindly librarians in Dickens novels do not appreciate swearing, or that's Anathema's instinctive feeling about it. She keeps the swearing to herself, a whirlwind of profanities at the enigma of how this man – who looks and speaks and sits like the childishly delighted and deeply embarrassing uncle at Christmas – has somehow deciphered the most advanced collection of prophecies in the world. In three days. And talks about it like a kid in elementary school bubbling about his favourite comic.

Mr Aziraphale looks concerned. That's all Anathema can tell before he drops his gaze and scrutinises himself intently, as if searching for something. Whatever it is, his disapproving face suggests he didn't find it.

"I can't help getting excited," he sniffs with a hint of reproach. But he rearranges himself on the chair either way, slips the coin back in his pocket and smooths out creases in his cashmere trousers. "It's a unique work, after all."

"You read my mind." Anathema stares. She's quite sure the only thing Mr Aziraphale gets for several seconds is static. "You said you weren't psychic."

"I'm not psychic – and it's not so much reading as skimming, really. Just the surface layer of what you're thinking at the moment." An accusatory expression passes across his face, then turns around for one last dirty look before it leaves. "You were thinking rather loudly."

"Sorry. I'll… try not to think so loudly." She does try. It's not easy when your brain is screaming at you that the man before you is not a man, and that you should know better than to burn your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother's prophecies. "And sorry for what I was thinking. That wasn't very nice of me. I just want to understand _how _you... How you did this. How you showed up at the airbase, how you knew about Adam and how you convinced those _beings _to not start Armageddon–"

The stovetop gives off an infernal hiss as soy milk bubbles out of the saucepan.

Water has a boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius, give or take some depending on atmospheric pressure. Milk, regardless of type and pressure, has a boiling point of Whenever You Have Given Up Waiting And Look Away From The Stove. This is one of Crowley's, which he would have received a lot more credit for if anyone in Hell had known the first things about cooking.

Anathema doesn't know about that particular quirk of physics. She still finds the boiling milk very curious, because she never actually turned the stove on. She is also very curious about her guest, who seems to have the ability to bend reality to his expectations in a way not unlike Adam.

Newton arrives eventually, with the characteristic clanking noise Dick Turpin makes when the engine cools. They all relocate to the living room because both Anathema and Mr Aziraphale look like they would prefer to be someplace comfy and informal for whatever they are to talk about. She and Newton take the couch, as they usually do. Mr Aziraphale takes the antique, button-back armchair, and looks like he was rented part and parcel with the rest of the inventories.

"So. Armageddon never happened, and that is largely thanks to you – to your skill and courage. Averting a global nuclear war is no small feat, after all. By comparison, this is, ah – nothing, really," Mr Aziraphale says, and is as convincing as his magic act. To his credit, he seems to realise that. He grimaces and tries again, this time more collected. "I came here because I need help. I don't know anyone more qualified than you two." His collected state lasts about three sentences. "There is an item I need to acquire. It is currently in the, ah, the British Museum. Which is a bit of a hitch, but I figured, for individuals so skilled at manipulating computers that they can deactivate nuclear launch protocols, a museum security system would be practically – well – and I really do need to get this particular item–"

"Just one? Why not more?" Anathema asks.

As methods of human communication go, silence is remarkably underrated. Newton's is saying _Has she gone mad? _Aziraphale's is saying _Did I spend 6,000 years worrying about Crowley's bad influence on humanity? I've been deluded. Swathed in a gauze of idealisation. Blinded and stumbling on the rocky shores of belief until the inevitable fall into the cold waters of veracity. _

"While we're at it," she adds, shrugging.

"That's… stealing," Newton points out, with that undercurrent of hesitation that comes from pointing out something that shouldn't have to be pointed out.

"It's the British Museum, half of what's in there is stolen already."

"Isn't that a conspiracy theory? From that magazine you've got, The New Aquarian? The one that talks about Atlantis and aliens and–"

"You met aliens."

"Well, yes, but–"

"We saw Atlantis on the news."

Newton is starting to realise that this is Waterloo, and he is Napoleon.

"I think that may have had something to do with Armageddon," he tries.

"That's my point!" Anathema gestures towards their guest. "Mr Aziraphale was there when Armageddon happened. He's here now. We don't have a book of prophecy anymore but if we had I'm sure this meeting would be in it! This could be _important_, Newt."

To his credit – or maybe not – he does consider her argument for a moment.

"It would still be stealing, though."

Like all witches trying to lead men into wickedness, Anathema recognises when it's time to change tack.

"Didn't you mention robbing a bank? Right before Armageddon, you said you regretted never robbing a bank?"

"Bank," he stresses. "Not museum."

This statement begs many questions. What novels did young Newton read as a child? Did he name his car Dick Turpin only for the pun? Has Aziraphale really been this bad at his job, or is humanity just like that?

"Does it have to be a bank? It's more or less the same, just exhibits instead of money."

"It's about the moral principle. Banks have always worked in their own self-interest. They exploit their position to make more money for themselves, and they don't care if that means lots of ordinary people lose their houses or their savings. I'd much rather rob a bank."

"But a museum isn't that different? Look, one steals people's future, the other steals their past. Besides, is it _really _stealing if the object in question is stolen already?"

"Uh, that– I mean, if you were returning a stolen object to its rightful owner, then I suppose not. But I don't know if that's what we're being asked to do." Newton looks at Mr Aziraphale with an expression that might be a plea for help.

Help is not coming, as Aziraphale is having another stint with an existential crisis.

"What's so special about this item you want us to get? Is there something magical to it, some curse, some prophecy?" Anathema notices the blank look in his eyes. "Mr Aziraphale? If you want us to help you, we at least deserve to know what we're getting into."

"Uh," he says. "Nothing special about it, dear. Just an ordinary piece of jewellery." He isn't quite sure if he should be grateful that he didn't need to do any tempting, or concerned for the young couple's future. "And it's just Aziraphale."

Anathema doesn't believe a word of it. She doesn't say so, because she doesn't need to. She speaks silence like a native, and the longer she stares at him the more he fidgets with his cup.

"It… belonged to someone."

At the mention of this someone, Mr Aziraphale softens. And nearly strikes Anathema blind.

Energy can take on a variety of forms depending on what you do with it. That's how humanity discovered radio waves, electricity, and a bunch of other technological achievements Newton can only ever sigh longingly about. And if you're going to explain these things by comparing atoms with solar systems, it's time to mention the comets.

The atom is excited. The surplus energy that is released when its electrons flamenco takes the shape of tiny glowing particles, called photons. These are more commonly known as light, which is what sustains all life on Earth – or burns through diamonds, if you focus them at a single point. The latter isn't a problem, usually, since angels conceal the divine radiance of their true form from human eyes. It _can _be a problem, if the human in question is gifted with the ability to see beyond the mortal plane, and the angel in question has a particular focal point for his excitement.

Anathema turns her face away with a gasp and a vaguely man-shaped afterimage buzzing in her field of vision.

"I'm fine," she assures, like someone who hasn't just stared point blank into the sun.

"You're crying," Newton points out. He is a nice, helpful lad, and leans in with a tissue.

"It's just the light." Anathema dries her cheeks, squeezes his hand reassuringly in hers. Her chest still feels the phantom ache of being stretched to its very limits. It's a lovely, devastating ache. The ocean of his light could flood her, could dissolve her in its depths, and nothing would have made her happier. "Sorry, it's just– So much _love_."

"You see auras?" Mr Aziraphale's face falls. "Oh of course you do, goodness me, how careless I've been! I'll turn it down right away, dear girl."

That's just ridiculous. People can't alter their auras at will, no more than they can change how many arms and legs they have. It's an aspect of their spirit, a small bit of their metaphysical Selves that shimmers through the veil just enough that people with the gift for it can see them. Most people aren't even aware they _have _auras. Yet Mr Aziraphale is closing his eyes and concentrating, and to Anathema's astonishment the brilliant glow actually soaks back into him.

"Better?"

She nods dumbly, takes a moment to wipe at her eyes again. "You're getting it for him, then? That… man that was with you at the airbase?" She doesn't know exactly what they are. She does know the love she felt had a shape and a voice.

"Yes." He looks proud. Sort of. In the hesitant manner of someone learning to dance for the first time. "As a surprise gift. He used to have long hair – beautiful hair, really – and he's growing it long again. I just happened to see that British Museum has his hair clasp and, well – I don't think they'd return it if I asked." Both Anathema and Newton lean in, trying to pinpoint the meaning of _return _in this context because, as the film critics say, there are continuity issues in this timeline. "His name is Crowley."

Crowley. Even with his aura dimmed down, Anathema feels the waves of that ocean lap over the room like distant song. It fills his eyes, fills his voice, the softness of his love – and his regrets. He never told him, Anathema realises. All that love, and he never told him.

"So." Newton isn't sure what exactly is happening, but Anathema seems to be okay and Mr Aziraphale seems to be whatever he is. "We _are _returning a stolen object to its rightful owner?" They both nod. Newton still doesn't really follow what happens but trusts that it will turn out alright. He looks at Anathema, just to confirm: "Just one?"

Laughter takes her by surprise, the kind of laughter that makes everyone look their most lovely completely by accident. "Just one," she smiles, and squeezes his hand fondly.

They consume several rounds of tea and cocoa between them as the details of the plan are hammered out. Newton is the computer wizard among them, so it's he who will have to get into the surveillance room. There will be a vacancy in the museum guard force, Mr Aziraphale assures, and they will hire Newton to fill it. He will be given the night shift, and his colleagues will be out while he deactivates the security system and swaps the real clasp for the replica. No one will notice anything amiss.

It reads like the manuscript for your average heist film – probably with George Clooney, and probably with a twist – including the part where Mr Aziraphale won't explain how these steps will be orchestrated. Things will sort themselves out, he says. Newton's lack of job qualifications won't be a problem. Staff leaving a newcomer in charge of the security won't be a problem. Nothing, really, will be a problem.

And maybe there will be no problems. Maybe it will all flow smoothly, like icing with not enough powdered sugar in it, and afterwards they will part ways with slaps in the back and congratulations on a job well done. Maybe this is the only time they will meet like this.

Anathema is curious. She's also American, which means she doesn't let politeness get in the way of her curiosity.

"What are you, Mr Aziraphale?"

The look he gives her makes her wonder if he, too, can see auras. Or something beyond auras, because the way he looks at her makes Anathema feel like he is seeing more than anyone should. As with the cottage, he is examining her with more than just his eyes.

She doesn't want to know what he sees. She doesn't want to know what that burning light reveals to him.

"I am a Principality," he says at last, with something that resembles a smile. It's the smile he wore when he dropped off her bike, and it should have clued her in already then that this is something that mimics a human and occasionally misses the mark.

"What? Like Wales?" Newton, like most people, is not psychic. He doesn't sense what Anathema senses. Newton is also not American, but that doesn't mean he can't slip up on the politeness.

There's a thing they do in photography called time lapse. It uses still pictures to create the illusion of fast-forwarding a usually slow process, like the shifting of the sky from dawn till dusk, or the exquisite unfolding of a flower. It's often set to beautiful instrumental music.

The time lapse Mr Aziraphale's face is doing is not an unfolding flower. It is a drying tomato, and it is withering with the steadily increasing concentration of acid.

Newton doesn't get an answer. Mr Aziraphale pointedly sips his hot cocoa and, when he sets the cup down, produces an aged, gleaming ornament that could never have fit in his waistcoat pocket. This is a replica of the hair clasp they are to steal, he explains, and turns the conversation back to the logistics of the theft.

The human mind is often likened to a computer. This effectively means memory is like a database, only it's the worst database you've ever come across. Some of the memories will be corrupted by negativity, and are downright toxic to revisit. Some of them are entirely made up. The tagging system is wildly inconsistent, and memories will reappear and disappear like the drunk ramblings of someone who has spent entirely too much time with their tumbler.

Anathema's internal database contains most of Agnes' prophecies. It responds to certain keywords, certain numbers, and the smell of a particular brand of oolong bought at the corner store two cities away from Malibu. There's only one mention of a principality in the Book, and only one mention of cocoa, and they happen to come in the same sentence:

_Open thine eyes and rede, I do say, foolish principalitee, for thy cocoa doth grow cold._

Few Devices had paid attention to prophecy 3008. They had hypothesised that it referred to the Portuguese rebellion against Spain, which didn't exactly make sense with the first half of the prophecy since the Portuguese had become independent in 1668 and the world had evidently not ended. Nothing had ever seemed to explain the first half of the prophecy until right now, when Anathema watches a Dickensian book collector, with mind-reading and reality-bending powers, sip cocoa in her armchair and look daggers at her boyfriend.

_When that the angel readeth these words of mine, in his shoppe of other menne's books, then the final days are certes upon us. _

An angel.

He's an angel.

An _angel _.

"Thinking loudly again, my dear," Mr Aziraphale says. He might have the kindest smile she has ever seen, but also the most impish.

* * *

**A/N**

§ More gleeful flirting with the Doctor Who franchise, and with Ocean's Eleven.

§ There's a joke in the book - or just a reference to a joke, really - that mentions Aziraphale is technically a Principality, but that people make jokes about that these days, so he doesn't use it to "introduce" himself. I looked long and hard to find an explanation to that joke, and it seems this is what's behind it.


	8. Tuesday Evening, a bookshop in Soho

**WARNING  
**This chapter has a flashback to the 80's, with the AIDS crisis and a deathbed visit.**  
**

* * *

**Tuesday Evening, outside a bookshop in Soho**

All good things come in threes. Wise men. Aspects of divinity. Full-course dinners. It's no guarantee that they _are _good, however, as bad things have also come in threes since Hell invented the concept of shoddy knockoffs sometime around 4,000 BC. Heaven eventually retaliated by inventing copyright law, but then Hell founded Disney and that was pretty much checkmate.

You'd think that three good things and three bad ones means it all balances out, and you would be partially right. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you aren't even sure which is which, as _blessing in disguise _can look a lot like its evil twin _Greek gift_. What's important is to remember that three is a holy number, and that angels are very particular about numbers.

There has been a total of three times when Aziraphale stood at his front porch and shook too hard to fit his key into the lock. The first was in 1862. Definitely a bad thing, no doubt about it. The second time was 1967, which was absolutely terrible but ultimately, it seemed, a good thing. The third time was just a week ago, when he found the rarest book on Earth in the backseat of Crowley's monstrosity. It did keep the world from ending, but he didn't get to keep the book, so the verdict is mixed on that one.

Those whose minds are so inclined will notice that the number three keeps coming back in the Book, that it's scattered throughout the text like dots lining a pattern of divine geometry that quietly repeats as pages turn. These people may appear to be mad, and could very well be, but it would be rude to presume.

It is dark before Aziraphale stands on his doorstep. The Thames is pouring fog into the streets, as if something is moving through London that needs to be hidden, and the old river heard their prayers in its sleep. It has always unsettled humans, the fog. It blurs lines and robs them of their points of reference in ways that have formed associations between fog and the supernatural, danger, and wandering lost. The same could be said of Soho, granted. And it could definitely be said that in the fog, Soho and its neon lights look positively otherworldly.

It _is _another world, Aziraphale thinks, as he tries and fails to sift out the right key. It's their world, it's just hard to believe it's happening. That he's _making _it happen. Aziraphale is a fine balance of anticipation and trepidation, where there is too much of both and the balancing scales are about to snap in half. Angels aren't in the habit of changing; the last major change he made in his life was installing electric lighting in his bookshop in 1912, and that was after 20 years of dithering. There are other things angels aren't in the habit of, too. Quite a lot of things, frankly, but courting demons is in the top three. The other two things in the top three are punishable by Falling.

It's a tipping-edge sort of moment, a feeling of teetering into the unknown, and Aziraphale is working himself into a frenzy with the practiced ease of a man-shaped being who has taken _love thy enemy _a bit too literally for the past few millennia.

It is appropriate, though. That he is on his doorstep a fourth time, key in hand and trembling too hard to find the lock. The geometry is about to be disrupted, a new page is about to be turned, and say what you will of panic but anything familiar is a welcome comfort.

Then there's a sound.

Most people, when startled by a sudden noise, turn around to search for it. Aziraphale turns his head up. It all happens in the fraction of a second: the snarl of nerves in his gut squeezes, his snare drum heart throws echoes down the street as he makes himself smaller, gives them less of a target for whatever is to come – harsh words or harsh blows.

There's nothing. Nobody there, not above him and not behind him.

Aziraphale's breath shudders out of him. A wisp stained with neon and fear. He wills the tension out of his muscles, soothes his corporation as he would a startled animal. His frantic thoughts aren't as easily convinced to release their death grip on anxiety. The mind is its own place, and all that. Can make Heaven and Hell manifest anywhere, especially if you've seen both. Especially if you can hear the thrum of divine wrath in your ears, cleverly masked as the rush of blood from your thundering heart. Six thousand years is a long time for fear and silence to carve themselves a home in one's bones.

There had been another time, on this doorstep. On a night of prayers and blurred lines. A tipping-edge sort of moment.

* * *

It's not uncommon for humans at death's door to say they see angels. Many times, they do. Things look different when you are fading slowly out of your body, like cold air seeping in from under an old wooden door. Things you wouldn't normally see appear more solid as you pass through the veil, and give rise to tales of angels coming to greet departed souls.

Aziraphale wasn't there as an angel. It wasn't _duty_. He was there because the patients in the terminal ward were part of his Soho as much as he was part of theirs.

And Soho _was _theirs.

It's a messy business, the birth of a society. There's no real plan. First come the homes, of various materials and ideas of living standards, then the afterthought of streets that frown at the concept of geometry, and the squares that are rarely actually square. The people who do the labouring aren't likely to receive credit for the end result, and at least one person deficient in self awareness will feel entitled to naming the place after themselves.

Soho was more of a planned conception. The gentry had eyed the muddy hunting grounds north of Westminster Abbey and envisioned squares and fountains and grand estates – even adequate sewers, which was saying something about the ambition of the project. Soho, at its time of birth, was meant to be a fashionable haven for the privileged.

It had been, for a while. Most things on Earth come with that disclaimer. Aziraphale had watched the rich and blue-blooded trickle away as the mirage faded and left Soho to destitution and disrepair. He had watched it birth itself anew, built up from the ground by the hands of people who had nothing yet were determined to make a place for themselves in the world even so. Over time the district had become home to refugees of every denomination: the exiles and the artists, the prostitutes and the poor. Elements society liked to rid itself of, like a farmer who keeps the finest fruit on display while throwing the bruised ones to the pigs.

It's a messy business, the birth of a society. You can't build trust from wooden planks, or turn bricks and mortar into camaraderie. It takes a wholly different kind of building blocks, that, and the residents of Soho found ways to craft them, each with their own unique skill set. From high and low, from the discreet gentlemen's clubs to the overcrowded rooftop tenements, they came together to knit that solid, intangible web that makes a society.

You couldn't avoid becoming a regular when you had lived in the same place for 200 years. Aziraphale knew the pulse of Soho like the beat of his own heart, and could trace a direct line from the members of _The Hundred Guineas Club _in the 1880's to the young men in those hospital beds a century later. He knew their faces, one generation after the other, the web continuous as old queens took fresh hatchlings under their wings and showed them how to gather their threads and knit. How to catch dropped stitches. Where to place anchors.

A.Z. Fell's bookshop had a reputation in Soho, everybody knew that. It was the kind that spread through silence and understanding looks, sometimes with a hurried whisper into the shell of an ear. It was never open, except when the hours at the edge of the night weren't dark enough to hide in. It was always open for those who needed it, one generation after the other.

The next one would grow up orphaned.

Aziraphale tried not to think of that when he pulled up a chair by the single hospital bed. It was a small room, reserved for patients like this one. It had a window facing West and would offer beautiful sunsets when the skies weren't too overcast. A complementary table had been brought in when the nightstand wasn't enough to house the flowers and the little greeting cards. Aziraphale recognised many of the names on them. He also recognised which names weren't there. Which visitors never came.

The man on the bed stirred, and Aziraphale pushed the thought out of mind.

"Mr Fell? You're a sight for sore eyes." He smiled, a motion that almost merged into the thin, white hospital sheets. "Haven't finished the book yet, m'fraid."

"I'm not a librarian, Keith, I'm not going to fine you. And anyway, reading isn't a race: it's a leisurely stroll in the garden in the afternoon sun." He softened into the chair, into that same afternoon sun that crept into the room. "How are you, dear boy?"

"Still kicking." A knowing gleam sparked in his eye.

"That you are," Aziraphale agreed. An old football joke from an old footballer who'd never quite given up the dream of playing the League.

"How's Nick?"

Ah. The young man with the green eyes and the poor taste in haircuts. They'd had a heated argument once, about whether or not slang had any place in literature, and they'd all roared with laughter when Aziraphale finally exploded that William would have bitten his thumb at anyone who lauded his works but was too uppity for slang.

Aziraphale exhaled softly, bringing the glow of the memory into his words: "No longer here, I'm afraid. They didn't tell you?"

Keith made a sound, of sorts. Tried to gesture his response but lacked the coordination for it. Morphine had a way of making things fuzzy around the edges. It was the smallest of blessings on a man beyond the reach of such, though it didn't have the good sense to blunt the edges that were sharpest.

"Bet you he didn't finish that song, then." Keith's throat bobbed when he swallowed the crack in his voice. The sheen in his eyes was not as easily dispelled. "Always told him to finish his fucking stuff before he moved on to the next thing."

"Including his boyfriends, as I recall."

Laughter wheezed out of him, like somebody had punched him in the chest: a startled thing that rattled the cartilage of his windpipe and triggered a fit of coughing. Aziraphale helped him sit and gave him a glass of water that had not been on the table. Drinking didn't go too well, between the coughs and the laughing and the hiccuping sobs, but the important thing was that Keith smiled. They had too much practice with crying these days, and far too little with smiling.

"You're a right bastard, Fell," he croaked and sank back against the pillows.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Aziraphale tutted and pulled the covers up over his thinned chest.

They talked about nothing in particular, like old acquaintances do, and joked in inappropriate ways like they always had. The pale light of streetlamps replaced the blaze of the setting sun and their quips took on another nuance of inappropriate, and everything was the way it used to be except it wasn't. Stitches were dropping, and there was no one to catch them.

Keith looked ever so slightly better than when he had arrived. Not good, but better: the lines on his face were less sharp, the glow of his soul more serene. He drifted off again bit by bit, pulled under by morphine and the pain it tried its best to dull.

"Thanks, Mr Fell. For everything."

One would have thought that a bookseller would possess a treasury of words: that a friend who had sat by so many hospital beds would know what to say in response. Aziraphale did not. Words had been his passion, never his craft. And there had been too many hospital beds. Whatever words he might have had had dried out, gone with each familiar face that left, and filled the hollow in his chest with something else. Not words. Not anymore. An unarticulated supernova grew where his words had collapsed, an unnamed pressure that choked much more than his ornamental lungs.

Soft scales whispered over the paved floor. Soft or heavy, Aziraphale would recognise those footsteps anywhere.

"Didn't wanna come too close before, in case – you know. If they can see angels."

The demon joined him at the bedside, hands tucked into the pockets of his trousers. He could have looked like a vulture, with his crooked, black brush-stroke of a body in the pale room; the flat, hard glare of his sunglasses; the slight hook to his nose. He could have looked like the plague doctors of the Middle Ages, heralds of death more than angels ever were.

He looked tired.

"S'like the cholera all over again." Crowley dragged his eyes over the thin body like one might pull a white sheet over the dead. "Found you here back then, too," he added in a barely audible mutter.

The cholera, yes. The fluttering memory of a few choice hints to a certain doctor with a sharp mind. Sometimes, miracles could be worked by human hand.

"You don't think you could…? Just one?" His words were small in the quiet of the hospital room. Small things were often missed. Perhaps, if his request was small enough, no one would notice if it was granted. If he didn't demand, maybe, if he were humble and pleaded, just one...

Crowley shook his head, a motion as small as Aziraphale's words. "They always keep an eye on the ones about to go." He didn't pace, mindful of the stillness in the room, but he swayed as if he wanted to. As if he feared he would be spotted if he were still too long.

Neither of them would be. There was no angel in Heaven or demon in Hell who cared to come all the way to Earth just to fetch a soul, not when it could be conveniently snatched up out of the ether once it had left its mortal husk. Aziraphale knew that, and for a moment he thought his chest would burst open and burn the world. Humans had been made to be loved, once. He'd been put on the wall for that express purpose, to guard them and love them like they were the greatest treasure in Creation.

Perhaps that command still mattered, even after their banishment from the Garden. Perhaps that was why this nameless pressure felt like it would tear him apart, too.

* * *

If Aziraphale were honest, he had always known. He loved the humans and their human things, their food and clothes and all the marvellous little curiosities they came up with. No one else did. Not Gabriel. Not Uriel. Aziraphale was never like other angels, and they had known that, too. That he was soft. That he was fussy. If they'd known that he had learnt to dance, as well, they probably would have disowned him entirely.

Aziraphale had bought the bookshop with human coin. He'd paid broad-shouldered boys from the docks to move the large, heavy shelves there for him, and then again to move the crates of books by horse cart. Had hired a local painter to make the sign above the windows. The bookshop was of Earth in every bit of its making, the very mud and brick and wood of it. Two hundred years carved into its bones, memories cupped like praying hands around this place on Earth he had made his.

Gabriel had come by just days before the grand opening. To tell him that he would be coming home.

He'd felt something tearing apart inside then, too.

A.Z. Fell's bookshop had a reputation in Soho. Everybody knew that. When he and Crowley returned to the shop there was spray paint sprawled over the front door, stark red letters that proclaimed God's hatred for the men in the terminal ward.

People tend to think of fire as the attribute of demons. It isn't quite as simple as that. Angels and demons are of the same original stock, the same original light that sparked all that is and was, and it is better to think of them as such. As stars.

It was not coincidence that Lucifer was called the Morning Star, and it was not coincidence that he went from white to red when he Fell. Of stars, the red ones burn coolest. It is a fire that bides its time, a cruel and vengeful thing that feeds on the slow torment of the damned and extends agony for eternities. The stars that didn't fall seem gentle by comparison, seem cold and distant, but the truth is they burn white-hot. That fire leaves no time for pain or regret. Heaven's wrath is swift, unforgiving, and Aziraphale was…

"Angel!"

Aziraphale was soft, and fussy, and, beneath layers of fragrant parchment and worn cashmere, he was of the Old Testament.

"Angel, listen, you need to get hold of yourself. Right. Now."

Crowley's miracle had followed immediately after, un-smiting what Aziraphale had done and muddling things to make it harder for their respective home offices to sort out. He snatched off his glasses, captured Aziraphale's eyes and held them fast. There had been no fog that night. Clear skies, electric lights, shadows cutting lines sharp and unforgiving across their faces.

"Get in, I'll make you cocoa, you pick out some nice book – recommended me tons of nice books, you did, and I never read a single one o' them, probably never will unless you sit me down and read aloud to me. Nice book with happy ending, yeah?"

"There won't be a happy ending, Crowley. Not for them." It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. None of it was, and the unnamed feeling within him screamed. "Rejected and abandoned and dying – for loving one another! For _love_, Crowley!"

They had been given love, unconditional and endless, the very heart of Her placed in their chests, and She had been given to all of them because anything else was unthinkable, unforgivable, because to deny someone love was to deny them to live. And they did this. To each other. To themselves. Fouled Her name, spat blasphemy on their gift, took Her words into their mouths and spoke as if that made them gods, and Heaven let them. For the Greater Good. For the Plan. Everything happening for the Plan. All deaths and pointless sacrifices forwarding the Great Plan in some ineffable manner.

"They were meant to love." It came out broken. Not words, not anymore. A mounting supernova. "We were meant to love them."

"Angel."

There's an elegant tale of what happens when people do things they shouldn't. When they can't resist that thing ghosting at the edge of their fingertips, at the back of their minds, the tip of their tongue: when they know that it's wrong, that it's bad, but they still do it. That sort of thing is called temptation, and the tale is of a woman called Pandora, and a box of things best kept locked away.

"Maybe there is no Plan." His voice unravelled in a rasp, the sound of crumbling mortar on a lid sealed shut and slowly pried open. "Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we all were. Maybe–"

"_Aziraphale._" Crowley grabbed hold of his shoulders.

They never touched. It had been an unspoken agreement for thousands of years, more secret than the Arrangement and more dangerous, too. Hereditary enemies didn't touch.

"Not one more word. No more questions, no more doubts, don't even _think _of it. Yes, they're dying. It's nobody's fault, no part of any plan! Humans die of diseassse every day!" A demon's eyes should not be able to do such things, Aziraphale had thought, as Crowley stared into him with snake-slit eyes that were infinitely soft. "And I know you love them. You know them by name, they come to your shop, you look after them like they were family–"

Aziraphale's chest tore with new sobs.

"Ssso mourn them," he whispered, ever so gently. "Mourn all you need, angel. But keep it to mourning. I don't want to see you questioning who is letting all this happen and why. I don't want to sssee you–"

Maybe he was forgetting himself, or maybe he let slip his glamours deliberately: when Crowley bit his tongue around the unfinished sentence, it was forked. When his eyes pleaded with Aziraphale, they were sulphur yellow through and through. There were scales shimmering across his face, scorched black with all the reasons why they hid from unseen eyes, why in 6,000 years they had never touched like they were touching now: why Aziraphale should swallow his words and hide them until the end of time.

"Crowley..."

He had almost ruined it then. _He _had almost been ruined. Had ached to touch him back, to reach for the one thing he knew was good and kind in this world, no matter what Heaven said. What did they know? Of suffering? Of family and rejection and moments stolen at the edge of the night, just to feel you had somewhere to belong?

It would have been easy, that time, if Crowley had been at all the demon he claimed to be. The slightest nudge would have tipped the scales and tipped the angel over the edge of that precipice; Aziraphale could feel it, too. The toeing of the line. The lightning charge around them, of air sucking in breath and preparing to let loose the whiplash strike of divine wrath. The taste of a rebellious tongue split to blood.

Aziraphale swallowed hard. Once. Twice. Clear his mouth, clear his mind.

"Thank you, my dear. I'm– getting hold of myself. Tamping me down. Pulling myself up by the bootstraps."

"Don't thank me." Crowley's fingers loosened, but his eyes held him as if he might crumble to dust any moment. He cleared the door and opened it with a snap of his fingers, led Aziraphale over to his armchair and miracled him hot cocoa and a handkerchief, and not for a single second did he take his eyes off him.

"What I don't understand is–"

"Angel," he clipped, low and tight.

"–the humans," he finished, feeling fresh tears heat the corners of his eyes. "How can they, Crowley? Their own children, and they just–" He dabbed the handkerchief at his eyes.

Sometimes the devil is in the details, and sometimes the details are in the devil – or in the devil's lips. Had Aziraphale not covered his eyes that time he might have noticed the tension that shuddered over Crowley's mouth, stopped at his eyes for a brief twitch and slid down in his shoulders, where it made itself at home.

"Nothing new, though, is it?" The demon resumed his restless pacing, carefully glaring any stacked books out of his way. "Too smart, too dumb, wrong nose, wrong job, wrong..." he flitted his fingers about for words, "socks. They can always find something they don't like."

"But it's _cruel_. And it's _wrong. _" Humans could be wrong. Were wrong quite often, in fact. Aziraphale swallowed thickly once more, just to be sure he knew what words were on his tongue. "This was not what the Almighty created them for." He choked a hiccup, drying more unbidden tears with the handkerchief. "What they're doing is wrong. They got it all wrong."

Crowley shrugged. The tension in his shoulders didn't budge. He hissed, but that didn't frighten it away either. "Does anyone know what She wants? All _they _got was that book and it's a confirmed train wreck: _you _of all people know it's a train wreck."

He waved a dismissive hand in the direction of Aziraphale's misprint Bibles, as if he didn't know how much the angel coveted those books. Not that angels covet. They love things, and some things they love very deeply and very specifically in ways they do not discuss with other angels.

"It is _quite _clear, if only they'd bother to _read,_" Aziraphale defended.

"In Old Hebrew."

Aziraphale's lips pursed. "I will concede that the translations are somewhat–"

"Like a game o' Chinese whispers."

"–unsatisfactory. We tried to fix that with the update and the no-translation policy."

"Then the humans misread that, too, and you know what the real problem is, with all those messages your lot passes down? They're so damn _boring_."

"They're not boring!"

"There's a whole book dedicated to numbering turtles and pigeons and _that _is boring. Nobody reads all that stuff! They skip to the juicy bits, they cherry-pick what they like – who even picks out the cherries, they're sour and nasty – anyway, they miss all context, and when they get to Sandalphon's report on that stunt back in Sodom–"

"Sandalphon is a–" Whatever had been about to come out of Aziraphale's mouth, it caught in the thin line of his lips. "A hands-on fellow. With little regard for... context."

"I believe," Crowley said, stilling his feet and cocking his head to the side, "that's not what you meant to say."

He then proceeded to say what he believed Aziraphale _had _meant. Mostly in words people didn't normally use for angels. Mostly in words angels themselves didn't use, either, which put Aziraphale in the uncomfortable position of wanting to berate Crowley but not wanting to explain how he had acquired that vocabulary. Then Crowley went on to describe Gabriel, and actually succeeded in making Aziraphale laugh.

"Wily serpent," he chided with no heart in it. No, his heart had been on his lips, quiet and longing in the shyest of smiles. He had far too little practice with smiling these days.

"Soft bloody angel," he returned with a slanted smile, which proceeded to slant right off his face and leave the kind of smudged grimace that comes from eating a chocolate praline only to discover it's rum and raisin. Aziraphale was crying again. The smile wobbled bravely on his lips, but he was weeping like one of those angels on Italian headstones.

"Okay, book, book, book," Crowley murmured as he flitted along the shelves of meticulously cultivated entropy. "Hell's sake, angel, ever heard of the Dewey Decimal System?"

Crowley picked out a book. It gave him a papercut. He gave it a few choice hints about what he would do to its still-photosynthesising botanical relatives when he got back to his flat: the pages fluttered the way pages do when they remember the feeling of having leaves, and the feeling of being turned into pulp. With a properly cowed book in hand, Crowley swayed back to the armchair and the couch, only to stop.

Aziraphale knew what he looked like when he was crying. He was red and puffy and glossy, like those tacky porcelain cherubs people put in display windows at Christmas. He knew because he'd sat in this exact same place, that night in 1967 when he thought he had delivered Crowley his death.

"Can't read the text when you're bawling your eyes out, I s'pose." Crowley sighed and pulled a full-body grimace, like an apostrophe with fever chills, before tossing himself down on the couch. "Fair warning, I am gonna do _all _the voices."

Demons never say _do not be afraid _when they approach humans because even demons realise that is a surefire way to _make _them afraid. But they do know how to pitch their voices, just like angels do. They can sound comforting when they want to, speak reassurance like sweet music, and make people believe everything is fine when they know it isn't. Forked tongues, as the saying goes.

Crowley did all the voices, and none of them was that voice. He did the silly nasally ones and the soft, reverberating murmurs, the daintily skipping staccatos and some odd, rolling accent that probably didn't actually exist. Before long he was speaking with his hands, too. Wide, exaggerated gestures that set the dust motes swirling in the soft light of the bookshop. Mockery always did bring out the wordsmith in him. A shame and a loss to the world, it was.

* * *

The lock clicks, the door creaks open, and the bookshop lights turn on. There aren't many ways for a building to say welcome home, but the soft, golden glow from an open door after a long day usually does the trick.

Aziraphale remains on the doorstep. At least in the corporeal sense. His mind is running old, familiar trains of thought past such picturesque sightseeing highlights as Worry, Panic, and Ridiculousness.

The bookshop is mostly tasked with producing unpleasant smells to keep customers away. It is of experimental constitution, however, and could probably double as a perfumery for people partial to scents such as sushi, freshly baked scones, and blueberry pancakes. Tonight seems to require something special, so it greets Aziraphale with a puff of filet mignon with mushrooms and that positively sinful cream and mustard sauce served at The Ritz.

Aziraphale is still not crossing the threshold.

Ever adamant that tenacity is the key to success – and that obstinacy will do in a pinch – the bookshop winds up the old gramophone. It doesn't usually come to this. But if it works for startling persistent customers it might work for startling life back into a spacing angel. A piano piece from _The Gondoliers _crackles out of the horn. It's a lovely gavotte, as upbeat and heartening now as it was a century ago in that gentlemen's club in Portland Place, and something does indeed seem to spark in Aziraphale's eyes.

Angels aren't in the habit of changing, or of courting demons. Angels don't dance, either. It would be undignified. Frivolous. In fact, not dancing is one of the distinguishing characteristics that marks an angel.

True to his nature, Aziraphale crosses the threshold with a skip and a twirl.

* * *

**A/N  
**  
§ The whole chapter is inspired by Bowie/Queen's _Under Pressure_.

§ Shoddy knockoffs referring to Ea-Nasir selling bad quality copper in Mesopotamia, and being a little bastard who saved all the clay tablet letters of complaint that were sent to him by angry customers.

§ A Greek gift is something that seems to be a good thing at first but turns out to be bad. See the Trojan horse and Pandora.

§ _"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."_ /John Milton, _Paradise Lost_

§ A Brief History of Soho that nobody asked for! There's some wonderful Charles Dickens descriptions still existing of certain squares around Soho, where you could hear the singers and violinists employed in various orchestras and theatres practice with open windows on warm summer evenings.

§ To bite one's thumb at somebody was the rudest gesture Shakespearian-era Britain knew, and Shakespeare used tons of slang in his works.

§ The cholera epidemic of 1800's Soho is a milestone in virology. It was Doctor John Snow who first concluded that the disease was waterborne by narrowing the source down to that one contaminated water pump. Before that people had all sorts of superstitions about disease.

§ One of the Biblical books is titled _Numbers_ and it really is just a roll call of every family and clan in the entire area.

§ _The Angel of Grief_ is just one headstone, but it's as famous as the Mona Lisa and has been ripped off in countless forms.

§ _The Gondoliers_ is a 19th century opera, and in the script book the piece "I am a courtier grave and serious" is the song that goes with the scene of Aziraphale gavotting at The Hundred Guinas Club.


	9. Wednesday Morning, a bookshop in Soho

****Wednesday Morning, a bookshop in Soho****

A.Z. Fell's bookshop is not a "den of iniquity"_,_ or anything of the sort. Even if it lies side by side with shops like _Silk Slam_ and _Vinyl Fetish_. People seeking that kind of establishment have plenty to select from, and not just in Soho. There is no shortage of massage parlors in London. Or all-you-can-eat buffets. Or museums.

Inherently immoral places, museums.

One could argue that places in and of themselves can't be immoral, and that would be quite correct. However, that fails to take into account that all things remember, although not exactly the way humans do.

Museums were private collections of the rich before they became open to the public. The rich were the only ones who _could _collect things, back then, and often did so in order to impress their peers with antique and exotic items. This is not the same as hoarding, mind. Hoarding implies an unattractive amount of smelliness. This brand of habitual gathering of unnecessary things is called greed, which is considered attractive indeed among the rich.

Gathering is another word that comes with specifications in the context of museums and their founders_. _Collections could occasionally be expanded through the type of gathering that involves sharp words and even sharper pointy objects of metal, because if something is antique and exotic odds are high someone else already owns it. This prompted owners of prestigious collections to hire simliar staff, with similar pointy objects of metal, that would ensure nothing that was added to the collection ever left it. Greed and envy are, after all, next of kin.

As for smelliness, some collections could be smelly, too. It depended on what was displayed, which in turn was determined by how much respect the rich had for their fellow humans. The exact amount of that respect is best assessed by visiting the Egyptian section of the British Museum.

The British Museum has gathered a very large, and smelly, collection. It has a very large staff, too, but only in daytime. At night, the guard is limited to the six individuals keeping an eye on the monitors in the surveillance room. It is the kind of job that entails a lot of card games, Ben Stiller films, and coffee. Their coffeemaker has no idea what a touchscreen is, and thinks cappuccino is a type of monk, which says something about the age of the thing. But it makes decent coffee and has never poisoned anyone. That they know of.

"Hello?" Newton breathes into the ancient receiver at the reception desk. The museum takes the matter of style seriously, and the coffeemaker isn't the only appliance that could have its own display cabinet.

"Newt? Is something wrong? You sound strange," Anathema says on the other end.

"Not really. I hope. I just wanted to know if you know anything about stomach illness? Or maybe food poisoning? Uh, and what you might do to fix it."

All people, at some point, wish they were living in a book. In a sense, they are. This is because books come from within, manifesting the geography of the human mind in reality. Books are everything sharpened and distilled and _real_, until they seem more real than reality itself, and that is why books always have and always will shape the world.

Newton was one of those children that physique barred from playing football and physics barred from playing video games. But the books were there, and, like so many children before him, Newton had dreamed of stepping in between their pages to live out the lives of heroes like Robin Hood, Huckleberry Finn, and Dick Turpin. Being told that Dick Turpin wasn't actually a hero doesn't matter much when you are ten years old, as long as you get to have gunfights and daredevil escapes on horseback.

At the moment, Newton is living in an Agatha Christie novel. The one with the unfortunate nursery rhyme name, in which a group of people are invited to an isolated island and die one by one under mysterious circumstances. It is not the book he would have preferred to be in.

"Is it the Thai food?" Anathema asks warily.

"I'm not sick. Not yet." He knocks on the wooden top of the reception desk. "But the others are dropping like flies."

It might come as a surprise that someone like Newton - who has an unusually science-oriented mind, for a witchfinder - bothers with superstitions like knocking on wood. Then again, someone with Newton's propensity for bizarre misfortune is bound to conclude that _something _beyond the realm of the physical world is keeping him alive, because everything _in _the physical world seems to work towards the opposite.

The first guard to leave had been Mrs Bains. It started out as a general queasiness and fatigue, for which no water or rest had helped. Eventually, she had resolved that it was better for everyone if she went home so they didn't catch whatever she had caught. Mr Grillo appeared to have caught it anyway, half an hour later, and then the same thing had happened to poor old Mrs Quigg.

"I don't think you're going to be sick, Newt," Anathema says distantly, tapping away at her computer as she speaks. "I think Mr Aziraphale is seeing to that."

Anathema is one of the few people in the world who has literally lived in a book, and is only just now getting used to this reality thing. She still instinctively turns to books to understand the world around her, sometimes. If she sounds a bit distant, it is because her mind is cross-referencing the current situation with select bits from the plagues of Egypt.

It takes a while to adjust to living in reality, as opposed to a book. It takes a while to adjust to other beings out of books inhabiting reality, too.

"Will he make sure they're all right?" Newton asks tentatively.

Anathema thinks some more of Egypt. Then she thinks of coin tricks and hot cocoa.

"Yeah. He will." She hits a few more keys and smiles at her computer. They now have a cosy hotel booked in Los Angeles. Under false names. Three banks within a 500 m radius.

The nursery rhyme never comes as far as "and then there were none", to Newton's relief. That isn't to say that relief is what he feels. It is quite overwhelming, in a both arousing and terrifying way, to actually be doing this. To adjust the zoom on the surveillance cameras and watch the monitors fizz and die one by one. It is a thing out of a dream, out of a book. A breathless, tipping-edge sort of moment.

If Newton is humming the _Mission Impossible _theme quietly to himself as he slides the gloves on and pockets the keys to the display cabinets, no one will ever know. If he switches to the _Indiana Jones _theme as he passes through the _Religious Icons and Imagery _exhibition, no one will know that either. No one will know how nervous he is. How excited he is. How he almost jumps out of his skin whenever his brain wiggles itself into hearing things in the adjacent halls.

Humans don't unleash bursts of energy when they are excited. That isn't to say there _aren't_ bursts of energy, but they are confined to speeding around the nervous system with no way out, like those slot cars Newton could never play with. There is all of the rapid heartbeats, sweating, and inhibition of higher brain functions in Newton tonight, and his hands shake almost too hard to fit the key in the cabinet lock.

* * *

A.Z. Fell's bookshop is not a museum, or anything of the sort, because its owner is a firm believer in denial. The shop itself has contemplated taking up the title since the combination of haunted house and museum seems to be working well for Madame Tussauds. It has also contemplated if it will need new floors first.

Aziraphale has not been this physically active since his twenty second jog with Gabriel. He will lose several pounds to pacing, at this rate. And carpets. All sorts of drawbacks to this pacing thing, but it's that or glowing like an anxious night lamp until Newton goes off his shift. Cell phones are a useful contraption, yes – when they work, which in Newton's case is never. Aziraphale has yet to figure out how to make calls without a phone, excitement or not.

The bell above the door gives a merry jingle, and Aziraphale stops pacing.

"Morning," Newton says with a shaky wave of his hand. His eyes have a caffeinated look, a little unfocused and more than a little energetic. He looks like he is soon going to suggest something dreadfully invigorating, like a morning run.

"Good morning! How did it go? Did you get it?" He might be glowing. If he is, he will blame the rising sun for playing tricks with the light.

"It worked," he says, breathless with excited disbelief. "All the others came down with food poisoning and dropped off, and then it was just me. And the monitors. The rest was… easy." His voice is a mix of wonder and terror: the voice of a man who is on the battlefield for the first time and discovers he has a natural talent for its gruesome business. "I could definitely have taken more."

Aziraphale starts on a lesson about how morality is not a plot of land to be owned but a garden that requires continuous tending and cultivation lest it wither. It's a very short lesson, because then Newton takes the hair clasp out of his pocket. The real clasp. The one that remembers an impish grin flashing across the dusty streets of a city that no longer exists.

It's a good thing, probably, that humans can't tell the way immortal beings can.

"Thank you," Aziraphale says, tongue stumbling on the thick swell in his throat. "Thank you, dear, you've no idea– oh it's _marvellous._"

Newton Pulsifer leaves the bookshop as the most blessed man in a century, to return to his equally blessed girlfriend and celebrate their debut as partners in crime. They will have long lives in excellent health, and many children, and their camels will never have parasites. That one hasn't been relevant in some time, but you never know.

This leaves Aziraphale to more of his new hobby: pacing. He is getting quite good at it. He can only hope this proficiency will spill over on other, less developed qualities of his, such as speaking. The nest is complete, the something that was missing has been found, but he needs the right _words_or he will end up blithering some absolute nonsense when the time comes to face Crowley. Yes, he has had 6,000 years to come up with what to say. That only makes this more ridiculous. It is ridiculous, isn't it? Overwrought, complicated, _stupid. _Stealing an old hair ornament to speak for him, really? As if he still hadn't learnt how to talk, after so many years and so many books, theatres, operas? As if the very word _angel _didn't mean _messenger_?

Still. It had taken many thousand years before he learnt to properly talk, not just deliver a message. There is a difference, in the folds and margins of things, between speaking and talking. Speaking is within the halls of hierarchy, a word given that does not expect to be spoken back to. Talking is a more congenial act, an exchange between equals, and that... had taken him a long time indeed to learn. Six thousand years, give or take, and therein lies the rub. How does one condense 6,000 years' worth of affection into words?

The brass bell above the door jingles again.

Bells have been used by shopkeepers to attract customers since before there were shops. Bells have been used for a lot of things, to be fair. Like sounding the alarm when invaders approach.

Aziraphale puts his pacing on hold to tell the customer they're closed, just forgot to turn the sign and lock the door, so sorry, try again some other day. He doesn't get the chance to.

"We messed up," breathes a Newton whose face bears a strong resemblance to that of a camel with parasites. "It's on TV."

Aziraphale does not own a TV. He may dance and own a computer but there are limits to depravity.

"Robbery at the British Museum," Newton continues, white as a sheet. "Police blocking off the underground and all exits from London." If humans could discorporate, he would. "They're looking for the night guard."

"Oh dear."

It's a cardinal rule in storytelling that something must go wrong. If everything goes as planned all the time, there is no story: no conflict, no climax, no resolution, and you might as well be reading an installation manual. Like all connoisseurs of stories, Aziraphale understands this and appreciates a good conflict_. _Like all connoisseurs of stories, he appreciates it less when it happens in reality.

"You are sure the cameras were off? And you wore gloves?" Aziraphale wrings his hands around the hair clasp as if it is the last solid thing in the universe. "You didn't leave fingerprints anywhere?"

"Only in the surveillance room! I had gloves when I opened the display case and doors and all." Newton clutches his head and grimaces as if he, too, is about to come down with food poisoning. "You don't think it's the hair thing? That they can tell it's not the same?"

"No no, the replica is perfect, absolutely identical. Oh dear..."

Crowley would know what to do. He has always been there to save him in a pinch, which is why Aziraphale has to solve this mess himself. Crowley has done more than enough already.

The bell above the door jingles a third time.

Two men in official-looking suits enter the bookshop. They expect to find Mr Fell not guilty of murder, as usual, as well as not guilty of cigarette smuggling, drug dealing, or tax fraud. They do not expect to find Mr Fell engaged in conversation with a wanted criminal, clutching in his hands an object that is advertised to be at the British Museum.

"Vincent?"

"Newton?"

The appropriate thing to do in this situation, as taught by film and other educational media sources, is either to ask what the other is doing there, or to dive for cover and start shooting.

"This wasn't what I meant when I said disable security systems!" says Vincent, who clearly hasn't had enough movie nights with his kids. This is not his fault, though. They don't want him to watch if he's going to comment on everything that is unrealistic all the time.

"You know how to hack security systems?" Vincent's colleague has had too many movie nights, and too much imagination.

"It's called cybersecurity testing, Paul, it's a vital part of any workplace these days, would be irresponsible not to do it. And _you..._"

Vincent is experiencing a moment of divine escstasy. The world is falling away around him, everything muted to his mind except for the beautiful geometry laid out between this barely-a-business shop, the flawless tax records, the man with the expensive vintage car, and the museum display object in Mr Fell's hands.

"We've been placing bets in the office all these years. Murder, money laundering, trafficking. You had to keep this shop in business somehow, some way," Vincent breathes, hardly believing they finally caught him. "No one ever bet art theft."

Vincent is not, in fact, experiencing divine ecstasy. Aziraphale has not been authorised to perform those since Saint Theresa. Too _ecstatic _for Heaven's taste. Which is nothing short of ridiculous, really - divine ecstasy should be, well, _divine._

"I _beg _your _pardon._"

Angels may have some features in common with birds - or, rather, the birds have features in common with angels - but that is where the similarity ends. Angels do not ruffle their feathers when they are upset, nor do they lay eggs. They do nest, of course. And sing. And they will deny it even under threat of hellfire, but they moult. However, they do not puff up into feathery balls of menace when agitated, and if Aziraphale gives the impression that he is then that too is a trick played by the light.

"I have been subjected to a great deal of misinformed accusations in my time but _trafficking?!_"

"He bet trafficking," says the man named Paul and quirks his head at his colleague. "I bet robbery, so I'd say I won."

"I haven't robbed anyone! This belongs to my- my-" _Husband_, he wants to say, but his tongue won't shape the word.

"It belongs to the museum that you _robbed_, or I guess you made _him _rob it 'cause he can crash any operative system by looking at it."

"So this means you _can _hack into our servers?" Paul looks at Vincent as if there is another betting pool in the office, one that Vincent doesn't know about and that Paul just lost. "And you never told me?"

"Just call the police, Paul."

"On it." The redhead shuffles backwards to block the exit. One hand holds a phone to his ear, the other turns the key and locks the door.

"Is that really necessary? What about presumption of innocence? You do know there is a perfectly sensible explanation to this, don't you?" Aziraphale says, trying to think of a sensible explanation.

"I expect I'm about to hear it."

"Well, you see..." Aziraphale may be a good liar, but not under stress.

"There was a... an alien. Who left it here. With a message of peace and cosmic harmony?" Newton isn't a good liar regardless of circumstances.

In the background, Paul is murmuring the address to the bookshop, and Aziraphale is vividly reminded of a beautiful summer day in Stockholm, 1628. People had gathered in the harbor to see Vasa, the Royal Navy's newest flagship, set sail for the first time. She was a dream of craftsmanship, fifty metres high and seventy long, with a transom shining in red and gold. She sank before she ever made it out of the harbor.

"Please, if we could just talk about this, you don't understand…!" Aziraphale pulls backwards into the shop, one hand clutching the hair clasp protectively to his chest and the other raised before him in a placating gesture.

Vincent advances cautiously, ready to lunge in case the bookseller tries to bolt through some hidden back door. Nobody is more surprised by this than Vincent. His crime fighting ambitions typically extend to writing crisply worded reports and yelling at people who litter on the pavement. Tax inspectors do not throw down with robbers, under normal circumstances, because they would very quickly not be tax inspectors anymore, or be anything else for that matter. That being said, when the circumstances are Newton and Mr Fell, two tax inspectors are practically a SWAT team.

There are two tell-tale signs that Aziraphale is in a state of distress. Or three, depending on how you count. The third is not so much a situational response as a lifestyle.

Aziraphale backs into the shop, into the circle under the carpet, and wishes desperately that Crowley was there.

There's elaborate rituals to summoning, down to the hour of day and what soap to wash your feet with. While people usually don't appreciate such unnecessarily complicated things, many are willing to reconsider after accidentally summoning an ancient monstrosity that curses them with vomiting tadpoles. So, rituals. Elaborate, complicated, foolproof rituals, each one painstakingly designed to call upon a single, specific demon.

Essentially, they're phone numbers.

"Who in the Nine Hells dares sssummon me?!" The acrid burst of smoke dissipates fast, while the smell of brimstone and burnt plastic lingers long enough that Aziraphale worries about getting it out of the carpet. "In broad daylight, on a Wednesday morning?! Don't you people have jobs to be at? 'Cause _ I _ have, and your sssoul is _ not _worth–"

Crowley is in the middle of an animated tirade when his eyes land on Aziraphale, whose face is trying to negotiate between delighted and devastated.

"Aziraphale? Someone's sake, angel, this isn't Canaan! I have a phone!"

Aziraphale knows this. He also knows he shouldn't actually have been able to summon Crowley like this, but what he knows most of all is that his gift-giving hopes have been dashed, ruined, and salted. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, or that terrible fish they serve in Scandinavia.

"And you were gonna date that guy?!" hisses a voice in the background.

"Oh I am," whispers another voice.

Aziraphale does not have time for that right now.

"I know you have a phone, dear, and I know you hate being summoned–"

"Then why summon me, you idiot? What if I'd been in the bath?!"

"I didn't know you took baths?"

"Well I might!"

"You don't have a bathtub."

"Then I'll get one so next time you summon me I can slosh water all over your books!" He swings his arms out at the bookshop, which, although this it isn't exactly what it had hoped for, nonetheless approves of the situation.

"I didn't _ mean _ to summon you! You shouldn't even have been– oh bother, this is a complete _ disaster_–" Devastated it is, his face decides, but only until delight gets the upper hand: "Were you baking something?"

At the ends of Crowley's flung-out arms is something that looks quite a lot like oven mitts.

"What?" With a sideways glance, Crowley, too, discovers his oven mitts. "Oh – yeah. Right. Baking." He tugs them off as if caught disposing of a body. "You've been going on about that crème brûlée you wanted to try out and I thought, you know – desserts you light on fire sound right up my alley, don't it? Decided I'd give it a go." Crowley has known Aziraphale for a long time and doesn't need to hear the question to answer it: "Vanilla, with blackberries."

"Oh that sounds– oh dear I ruined those too now, didn't I? Look, I really didn't mean to summon you here, it's just that this is all getting quite–"

"Is that police sirens?"

The strangled noise Aziraphale makes in response is the exact same sound dignity makes when it sinks through the floor and into the molten core of the earth.

Crowley's eyebrows arch up, and his chin dips down, and if the chattering nuns of Saint Beryl had learnt wordless communication from him they would never have mixed up any babies, ever.

The police enters the bookshop, and the flagship Vasa is not only sinking, it is going up in flames and giving off a truly Hollywood-worthy cascade of explosions. Debris will be located as far away as the Mediterranean.

The four police people fan out, taking stock of the situation and who is most likely to cause them trouble.

"Newton Pulsifer?" The woman sounds – and looks – like someone who enrolled in the force at a time when being a policewoman meant you had to be twice as tough as a policeman to be taken seriously at work, and made the assumption that tough also means rough since they're only one letter apart anyway.

"Yes," Newton admits. His hands have been in the air since the police cars pulled up outside.

It is with some embarrassment that all four police persons turn from Crowley to the suspect.

"Hand over the Russian icon you stole from the museum, Pulsifer."

Like fine wine and food, different types of silence go with different types of response. The awkward silence pairs well with a sudden observation of something unrelated, while the heavy silence goes with a bit of deep, gutting honesty to bring out its full bouquet. The type of silence that fills the bookshop is simpler, and is most commonly followed by an exclamation of 'what?'. But not just any 'what', because nothing is that simple. There is art to fitting a 'what' to the precise dimensions given by the silence, not so big that it pours over but not so little that it can't fill the width and depth of it.

There is only one person qualified to produce such a 'what'.

"Oh, you mean the one in the car?" Crowley snaps his fingers in a manner that suggests he just connected the dots. The silence departs like a slighted lover. "That car this brave guard person tracked down to get it back?"

The policewoman, who is also quite apt at wordless communication, sends one of her colleagues out with a look. The car parked outside the bookshop is locked, because this is London, but a peep into the backseat confirms the presence of the stolen icon.

"Who's the owner of the silver Hyundai outside?" asks the policeman when he comes back.

Newton tentatively lowers his hands. The tax inspectors, on the other hand, exchange bewildered looks and stammer something about a business car.

"Step outside and unlock the car, please."

"But– You can't trust _him!_" Vincent jabs a finger in Crowley's direction. "He's–!"

"He just _appeared! _Materialised out of thin air, right in front of us! You can't trust somebody who pops out of thin air!"

The police knows you can't trust somebody who hallucinates, and firmly escort the inspectors out of Mr Fell's bookshop. They request that Mr Pulsifer come along as well, to testify. Newton leaves with a quick, grateful nod to Crowley, who quirks the tiniest of smiles.

Aziraphale's smile is not tiny.

"Oh, Crowley, _dear_, I..." Aziraphale is about to start crying. "_Thank you! _"

With all the allusions that have been made to atoms, one might be led to wonder: are angels and demons subject to radioactive decay? If they destabilise, will they begin to fall apart? Do they dissipate all over the place, like dust motes, or do they just explode? The answer is: no. But they might look like it.

Crowley lets him go on tripping over himself for a while. Hears out the trailing explanations and apologies and thank yous that pile high enough to pose a hazard to passenger planes - it's only polite, after all, not interrupting people. He plucks his glasses off and twirls the frame lazily between his fingers, waiting. A smile wiggles on his lips. The other parts of his face deliberate whether he should respond or just keep smiling.

"How d'you figure I knew, exactly, which icon the coppers were looking for?"

"It was on TV?" Aziraphale tries helplessly.

Now the smile is still, and the rest of Crowley is wiggling – keeps wiggling, until understanding dawns in Aziraphale's eyes.

"_You_ stole the–? You _stole?!_ _Crowley!_" he bursts out with all the righteous indignation of an angel who would never dream of robbing a museum exhibition of priceless historical artefacts.

Crowley flicks his gaze to the hair clasp and back up to Aziraphale's eyes, where it does things to the angel's composure that even dog-ears in hardbacks can't. His grin grows downright devilish.

There might be amendments to make regarding the statement that angels don't explode. There might be mending to do on the shop, too, if the man-shaped lightning storm that is Aziraphale continues to rattle the fabric of the material universe.

Meanwhile, Crowley laughs. It's the full-bodied kind of laughter that lights him from inside, fans out from his eyes and paints crinkles of unadulterated joy all over his cheeks. He laughs and his corporeal form fills with it, shakes with it, boneless and happy, and Aziraphale would steal the pyramids right off their foundations to see him like this again.

Aziraphale is laughing, too, eventually. He can't help it. The entire situation is too absurd, too silly, too...

"You don't think I've been ridiculous, then? With all this hubbub?" he asks, when they are both weak and sore and spent.

"You're always ridiculous, angel. Stealing from British Museum." Crowley is trying very hard not to start laughing again. "Is it even really stealing if you're returning a stolen object to its rightful owner?"

They're both ridiculous, Aziraphale thinks, as he pretends to be deeply morally concerned that Crowley would even think of such an argument. They're both absolutely bleeding ridiculous, and he cannot let Crowley know that or it will be like that time he misunderstood _sup_.

Crowley might just be a bit more ridiculous than Aziraphale, though. And not the good kind of ridiculous.

"Crème brûlée, was it?" Aziraphale shoots a look at the oven mitts that still swing idly from the demon's fingers. It is a look that Knows.

Crowley pretends to clasp his blistered hands behind his back in a casual manner. "Something brûlée-ed. Of a fashion." He sees the expression brewing on Aziraphale's face, and offers: "Can still try making you one, if you want?"

At this, Aziraphale's expression goes from brewing to boiling. "Crowley, you idiot! You could have gotten yourself seriously hurt! What were you thinking? A whole exhibition hall filled with blessed objects!"

"Yeah, well. Sometimes you just gotta rush in and rescue a notorious outlaw."

Aziraphale gives him the sort of look that desperately wants to be disapproving but is just stupidly fond.

"Don't you think you can worm out of this with glib remarks, Anthony J Crowley. Why would you steal an icon? It's not... _them_, is it?" A look of worry touches his face, and it is a look that remembers Hastur dropping the usher demon into a tub of holy water. "If you need insurance, I can–"

"Oh, no, not like that, not at all. Remember Novgorod? In the, what, 1100-something? You were in Russia, really ambitious gig with an eclipse, nothing of that scale seen since Moses. Freaked the Hell out of the besieging army. And you told me about it after 'cause one of the monks saw you, and you were worried it would escalate the Great Schism. But all he did was paint his next icon not a Mary and not a Christ, but an angel with golden locks," he smiles. It is the sort of look that desperately wants to be cool and confident but is just stupidly fond. "Thought it would fit nicely in your shop. Very limited edition – the only icon there is of a holy thief. I know. Checked the whole exhibition."

"Oh shush." He would try again for the disapproving look, but finds that he can't actually look at Crowley at all. "We already established, it's not really stealing if it belongs to you in the first place." Aziraphale swallows. It's not easy, learning this thing called honesty. "You did look gorgeous with it," he says softly, hands thumbing the clasp.

"Shut up." Crowley pulls a face, because he is made of wit and edge, sharp angles and brazen colours. It is easy, the faces and the joking. Much easier than the alternative.

"More than gorgeous," Aziraphale breathes, and it is the sound of things that have been kept locked away, of crumbling mortar on a lid sealed shut and slowly pried open. "I always thought you were clever – no, brilliant. You're brilliant, Crowley, in every way. And gorgeous, and brave. So much braver than I was." Courage is not the absence of fear, he reminds himself as his hands tremble around the hair clasp. Courage is the assessment that something else is more important than fear. "You've given me so much, my dear, and I– I felt ridiculous. For never giving back. I always wanted to, even the smallest thing, _anything_. And now I finally can."

It feels good to say it - like light, like absolution. It feels less good when he manages to look Crowley in the eye again. The demon isn't wearing his sunglasses, but he might as well be. There are things moving behind his eyes that he isn't letting Aziraphale see, blurred like shapes hidden in fog.

He remembers 1967, that dreadful night of 1967. He had given Crowley what he had wanted for a century, and Crowley had offered to give him what he had wanted for millennia: for a brief, hysterical moment Aziraphale thinks that maybe it's he who is going too fast this time, that he has misjudged it all and that Crowley and he aren't on the same page.

Hysteria never did favours for anyone's thinking. Of course they are on the same page. It's just a matter of writing the lines so that both can read.

Aziraphale buys all his clothes tailored. He likes the feeling of something made by hand, fit perfectly to his shape, and cut to make him look his best. You can have almost anything on Earth tailored to suit your needs, but only almost, and that's the tricky thing when you need to put 6,000 years into words. They don't quite fit. There are no words that sound the way it feels to hope and wait and long for six millennia, and Aziraphale can hear it, too. That in words, it sounds like business and gratitude, like returning favours and paying off debt.

"That came out wrong, didn't it?" Aziraphale's face draws together in a grimace, as if he could pull the words back into his mouth with enough muscle work. "It always does. Always preferred relying on the words of others – easier that way." He's about to start blithering. He can feel it. "They don't much encourage you to put words to your own thoughts Upstairs. Especially not this kind."

There are endless lines of poetry he could speak to Crowley, humanity has made sure of that. They have strung words so _searingly _beautiful the heavens weep, words that come easily to his tongue because they always have, but they aren't his. So very little of what he has said for the past 6,000 years has been truly _his_, and he'll be damned if he lets those old fears speak for him now, when they are the only obstacle left to overcome.

"This is– What I want to say is– I'm not talking about our Arrangement, or that box of chocolate you brought when I opened my shop, although I do appreciate all those things too–"

"Angel." Crowley gently takes the clasp from his hands.

He makes it look easy, this thing. The daunting simplicity of turning thought into action, this thing that Aziraphale has spent millennia just entertaining the concept of.

"What's _really _ridiculous is that you should pick up this, of all things." Crowley is made of wit and edge, sharp angles and brazen colours, but that isn't what makes him gorgeous. "It's not actually a hair clasp, you know? I mean, I used it as one, but I made it as a cloak pin."

Crowley hides a great many things, because he is used to. Because six thousand years is a long time. There are doubts shifting in his eyes, and fears to keep them company. There is softness, too, and questions that even the Serpent of Eden never dared to ask. A demon's eyes should not be able to do the things Crowley's do, but Aziraphale suspects that whoever said that was the same person that said angels don't dance.

"Was never much into wearing gold, but you always did." Crowley turns his gaze down, strokes the shape of the metal with his thumb. Metal he shaped himself, long ago. "I thought it would be... fun? If I could get you to wear something a little less angelic. Just never got around to giving it to you. You know how it is – things got in the way."

"Things?" It is all he can say, or he will start crying again. He knows what Crowley is doing. What he has always been doing, whenever Aziraphale needed it.

"M-mh. Civil unrest. Roadwork. Tax inspectors – they really can ruin most things, tax inspectors."

Aziraphale laughs helplessly, and it feels like absolution. Crowley smiles.

"Before I knew it, time had passed and you didn't have a cloak to wear it on. Or a toga." Crowley lifts his arms in a shrug. "Seems it's caught up with me," he says with a mischievous wiggle and one question still hiding in his eyes, 6,000 years too big to fit in words. "It's still yours." Long, thin fingers hold the ornament towards him. "If you want it."

Wanting is not something angels generally do: it is much too closely related to desire. It implies that angels would be flawed like humans are, and amenable to temptation, which they are not.

Also, angels don't dance.

"Well..." He drags the word, drags his eyes over Crowley's lips. "If it's mine, I suppose..." He lifts his eyes to Crowley's and takes the pin slowly out of his hand, as he would the first bite of a dessert. "I could do whatever I wanted with it?"

It is a very conscious choice of words, and the slip of muscle in Crowley's throat when he swallows is delicious in its own right. Demons and angels are_, _after all, of the same original stock.

"You, uh, have anything– anything specific in mind...?"

He does. First of all that it's about time he turned thought into action.

Aziraphale crosses the last distance, and brings his hand to Crowley's hair. Temple first, just the ghosting of fingertips. It doesn't burn. He sinks his fingers into the curls, carding through them like water, and it doesn't burn.

There might be amendments to make regarding the statement that demons aren't subject to radioactive decay.

"I am terribly ridiculous, I know. I'm afraid that's your fault, my dear." Aziraphale hooks the cloak pin around one finger and runs both hands through his lovely hair, pulls the long, snaking curls back from his face.

"And I don't regret a second of it. Not even stealing from the British Museum." He keeps the hair in place, seals it there with the clasp. Leans so close their noses brush.

"I don't want to ever _not _be ridiculous with you, so…" The pin slides slowly through the ringlets of the clasp, a whisper of soft scales through grass. "It's yours," he murmurs, so close he can feel Crowley's breath flutter hot against his lips. "If you want it."

There might be a yes.

There might be many, but there isn't enough space between their lips for them to be heard.

* * *

**A/N**

Well this was a ride! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

§ The Agatha Christie book is one of the most iconic mystery novels. It was published in the U.S. as "And Then There Were None" but had a different title originally.

§ Saint Theresa has been immortalised as a Bernini statue, and is famous for looking ecstatic in a very un-Christian way.

§ The Capuchins are a religious order in the Catholic church. There's also a Capuchin monkey. I don't think the two are related.

§ The terrible fish Scandinavians serve is fermented herring (surströmming), or other small fish. It's one of those foods that are banned from public areas because of the stench.

§ __"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear."__ /Franklin D. Roosevelt

§ That icon exists, and it is named The Angel of Golden Locks because nobody knows which angel it depicts. It was found in Novgorod and dates back to the 12th century. It so happens that in 1169, Novgorod was under siege from the Suzdalians. A miracle is said to have occurred where "the night came down as it was when Moses had been leading the Israelis through the Red Sea", which ultimately made the enemy army panic and roused the Novgorodians to strike them down. If you read this fic on AO3, you'll see Clenster has drawn the icon in his comic in chapter 5. :)


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